All right. Maybe we don't get an intro from the operator, so we'll hop right into it ourselves. Thank you, everybody. Are we connected?
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Are you good? Can you do an intro and tell people how to ask a question, please?
Certainly. So for people who would like to ask questions, you may type in your question in the text box on the lower left corner of the webcast screen.
Thank you very, very much for joining us today, everybody. We've just finished our AGM, and now we're going to go into our corporate update. We will, of course, be making a number of forward-looking statements today, so please do visit our website, see our prospectus to read more about the company and our continuous disclosure document. It is my pleasure now to turn the floor over to our Chairman, Ross Beaty.
Thank you very much, Rhylin, and welcome, everybody, to the 2024 Annual General Meeting of Equinox Gold. This is our sixth meeting. We began this company at the beginning of 2018, so we've been going just over 6 years, and it's been quite a ride. So I'm going to go through some general slides today. More than anything, talk about what we kind of promised everybody we were gonna work on in 2023, like a report card, and then talk about where we're going in 2024. So a year from now, I hope I'm come back with the same successful results that we experienced in 2023. Just getting started, this slide kind of starts. It tells the whole story of the company's growth.
And it's, it almost leaves me breathless when I read that first sentence. You know, we've gone from basically just sort of an idea. We had a number of exploration properties to become, you know, a very large, diversified gold producer. During the last 6 months, 6 years, we acquired 1 mine and 2 companies. We built 3 mines, sold 2 mines, created 3 new spin-off companies, and we're now commissioning 1 of Canada's largest new gold mines, all in pursuit of our mission to become one of the world's large gold producers quickly. So when you try to do these things quickly, one might ask, why are we doing it quickly? The first reason is that scale counts these days. Going big is a value-creating proposition by itself, and we're all going to realize that when it happens.
But frankly, it hasn't quite happened yet, but I think we're very much on the cusp of it now, where we will trade at a premium, we will trade at a superior valuation to conventional metrics, price and net capital, price and net asset value, those kind of things, when we get there, and we're very, very close to getting there now. So when you start these things as a big idea, you, obviously, you know, without a large financial base, you have to grow by acquisition. It takes too long to grow by discovery. Developing projects, typically a mine, might take, you know, 20 years these days from discovery to operation.
And I typically didn't have that time personally, and I know our senior management who joined me when we started this, like Greg Smith, didn't have that, didn't have that desire to do that long run. And to grow quickly into a large company creates value by itself. You know, you get into different indices, you have much more liquidity, you have access to deeper pockets of capital, you have access to bigger shareholder base. So it's a good thing to do, and you can only do that by acquisition, and that's why we have been a very acquisitive company. Just to follow through the story, we started with no production in 2018.
We bought the Mesquite Mine at the end of that year, and we spun out a series of copper assets we had that were non-core to the business of building a large gold company. In 2019, we built the Aurizona Mine, and that was a successful startup. That's on time, on budget, and that's been a very big contributor to our company since then, and that's in northern Brazil. In 2020, we acquired Leagold, which brought us four mines in Brazil and a big mine in Mexico. We also built a small scale, kind of like a phase one mine at Castle Mountain, which we had acquired at the very beginning of our business in 2018.
It came with the startup of Equinox, and that was built as a sort of a small mine to maintain our presence there, but really as a learning experience, I guess, for our very large scale mine that we're going to build in due course on the same site. Then in 2021, we sold one of the four mines in Brazil we acquired through Leagold. We then acquired another company and... That had the Greenstone deposit in Ontario, all designed to make a better portfolio. You know, when you have a limited capital base, you're just starting out, you can't afford really expensive big mines.
So it took us a couple of years to get the scale and the financial resources to be able to acquire a real leading deposit in Canada that had had exploration being done on it for 15 years and was pretty ready to build. We had the capacity at the time, and we began to be able to acquire Premier Gold. We spun out some non-core assets to the Premier Gold management team, called i-80. That's a Nevada gold asset package they've done a pretty great job with. Then we started construction at Greenstone. Again, I want to emphasize, the idea with Greenstone was to add quality to our portfolio, more scale, and allow us to really become a long-term, low-cost gold producer. Because the mines we acquired at relatively low cost-...
Both Mesquite, short life, relatively high-cost mine, and the Leagold mines, relatively high-cost mines. We didn't pay a lot for them, I think it's fair to say. We got Premier Gold, we got this world-class asset, but we had to build it. So we've been in kind of a stasis from the standpoint of production growth for the last 2 years, while we focused on building this great mine in Ontario. We had a 60% interest, and as many of you know, just a couple of weeks ago, we acquired the balance or we are in the process of acquiring. We announced that we are going to acquire the balance, making it a 100% owned asset.
So when you look at these, this timeline, you know, in 2018, we produced 25,000 ounces at the end of the year. 2019, we went from Leagold, 2020, 2021, we had that rapid scale-up of production, these remaining from the Leagold assets. 2022 was a sort of a bumpy year. We had a tough year at some of our Leagold mines in Brazil and in Mexico. But we were going with the construction all through that year of Greenstone, similarly in 2023.
So our production kind of flatlined in those years, but all of a sudden now, we're at the absolute cusp of starting production at Greenstone, and this is going to be kind of the, in the, in the words of Chairman Mao, you know, the great leap forward for this company. We are going to make a great leap forward in many ways, in gold production, quality of jurisdiction. Northern Ontario is about as good as it gets in the world, and most importantly, lower costs, which will have flow-on effects, give much, much better free cash flow generation and ability to deleverage, get rid of some of our debt that we've accumulated through acquiring these assets and building these mines, and, and really sail on into the future as an assured low-cost, very large Canadian gold producer.
That's the mission we've had since day one, and we are very much on the edge of achieving that. So that's kind of the history, and it's... Like I said, it's almost, you know, if you look at what we've done, it's pretty, I think it's pretty impressive, and we couldn't have done it without, you know, this fabulous team we have and this fabulous board. So today, the snapshot of, you know, where we are today, seven mines, almost eight, you know, a couple of weeks from eight. Four countries, the big new Greenstone mine, diversified portfolio, large gold production, and most importantly, lower costs as we get Greenstone going to what is a relatively high-cost portfolio that we've had since day one.
Next, you know, I think this is a snapshot of our great board of directors. I already sung their praises in our annual general meeting today, but I'll do it again today, right now. I just convey to all of them, on behalf of all of our shareholders, if I may, my great appreciation for the dedication to this company. This board is diversified, it's smart, they're all skilled in different things, and they're all committed to the company. An example of this is last October, when we had an opportunity to take five days out of all of our lives and do a tour of four of our mines, and have input from them on their own experience of what we might be doing here differently or there differently.
It was a great tour, and I just want to convey to our shareholders just how dedicated and helpful our board is. My appreciation to you all. And I'd say the same thing about our management team. You know, I've been in this game a long time personally, and while the other company that I built up with the help of thousands of other people, Pan American Silver, also has a sterling management team. I really want to say that Equinox, you know, our shareholders can be content knowing that we have a wonderful, wonderful team. And not only are they smart and dedicated, they're also very nice people.
They're people that you will enjoy talking to, that give you a lot of compassion when days aren't perfect, and celebrate the great things we do when days are better. So again, I'd say each one of these people and all the... We have what, 8,000 people now, Greg, in our company? All the people at our sites, at our operations, the communities that we work with, the support we get from governments, our indigenous relations across the board, everywhere we work. My great appreciation on behalf of our shareholders, to each and every one of you and all the people who report to you. Thank you. Okay, the next slide here, this is really kind of what I'm proud about. You'd never know that today we actually had a rather crappy first quarter.
We had some all sorts of disappointments at different ones of our mines. It was one of those quarters, you know, sometimes you have great quarters, sometimes you don't, and the key is not to look at one quarter, it's to look at the whole, the whole year and actually where we're going, which I think is a much, much, much very, very happy story. So a year ago, this was—these were our cards. We described these in our meeting exactly one year ago. We were going to, first of all, build Greenstone on time and on budget. And I think you might remember a year ago, I expressed my disgruntlement about the wall of doubt that was out there.
Every single gold analyst in the Street, many shareholders, many institutions, everybody said, we're gonna blow our budget, we're gonna explode our schedule at Greenstone. Because every other gold mining company in Canada that's built a gold mine in the last five years or so has done that. It's just been a terribly bad record. But guess what? We ended the year in 2023, we were on time, we were on budget for construction, and what a great, what a great success. And I convey all of the appreciation of that to the whole Greenstone team and our management here at Vancouver. On time, on budget for the first gold quarter in May. Well, it's May now, and you might say, "When's it gonna happen?" The answer is soon. Very soon.
We will hope to be announced by today, and this is just how startup happens. You have little things that leak and pumps that blow and valves that don't work, and stuff like that. So that's kind of what's going on, but it's nothing major. It's on the custom startup, and we hope to be able to make a big announcement in a week or so. So we're basically complete, and then the whole next phase of operation is going to be a joy, I think, for actually what I think will be decades. Decades. That's one of Canada's largest, lowest cost gold mines. It'll get better, a little bit more cheaper. Secondly, of course, you want to do is achieve guidance.
We didn't hit the top end of our guidance, but we hit the low end of our guidance, which is, the way it goes. And, you know, we had a pretty good year on operation of the other seven mines. We have hit our cash cost guidance, and we achieved our all-in sustaining cost guidance. We replaced our reserves, and we grew our resources. That's a core objective for any gold mining, any mining company, period. You have to replace your reserves or you ultimately, go out of business. And so we've got a great exploration group at all of our mines and our head office, and I think that's been another successful, result where we did achieve that. And then finally, you know, we've got all this growth. We've got all this internal growth.
Really, besides Greenstone, we have the Aurizona mine, where we're going to go underground and develop that underground mine for many, many years to come. We have Phase 2 at Castle Mountain. That'll deliver about 200,000 ounces a year, up from maybe 25 we produce right now. And at Los Filos, this is the one I'm really looking forward to the most because it'll mean that we have a really new relationship with our communities. We'll be able to implement a new plant there, a new carbon leach plant that will allow us to increase production and run that mine for a long time. So in 2023, what we did there was we implemented all kinds of operational improvements, and we advanced a dialogue with the community, so very important. All of this meant last year, we had reasonably good performance in our stock price.
We outperformed all the usual peers, I guess, and the gold ETFs. I will say this, this was partly because of, you know, over the year, people got less worried about Greenstone construction, that well, it's gonna be on time, so we had a nice pick up there. But we had had this, this wall of debt in 2022 and some problems with some of the mines, which I think made us just crazy oversold in 2022. But we ended the year in good form, and since the end of the year in 2023, this 2024, I mean, we've had a reasonable pick up in equity performance, driven very much in large part by the gold price. It's rather extraordinary move in the gold price in 2024.
So this is what Greenstone is going to deliver to us, why it's so very important to the story today and for the next 15 years or so, or 20 years. Obviously, it's going to add just the 40% of Greenstone that we're acquiring now; it's going to add about 140-160 thousand ounces a year to the company, including over the whole life of the mine, 144,000 ounces. It's going to decrease our cash costs significantly. I don't know who all saw the quarter we just reported this morning, yesterday afternoon, but you know, we have high cash costs. They will trend down anyway during the year because we're going to have better production, I think, over the next 9 months at our other mines.
But adding Greenstone to the mix is really going to drop those cash costs material. I'll come back to that in a minute. It'll also significantly increase our free cash flow. Our EBITDA, just that 40% will add $200 million a year, depending on the gold price, of course, and when operating in the past, which should be late in 2024. Obviously, it's a very rare opportunity to get a world-class mine like this in Canada, is owned 100% by a company like ours. It's one of the only large gold deposits in the entire world that's not held by a major mining company in the top 10, gold producers globally. So it's, it really positions us in a very rare, group.
It increases our gold endowment significantly, it increases our scale, as I've already talked about, and it gives us some great opportunities, in terms of expansion. These are just a couple of graphics on the production, the cost reduction, the increased EBITDA, that this additional low-cost gold production will give us. The black is the current production forecast before we acquire the 40%. Adding that extra 40% in green, you can see it, bringing our gold production this year to just shy of 800,000 or about 800,000 ounces, and next year, close to 1,000,000 ounces, the year after, the same thing. Then the blue line is the cash costs before 40%.
You can see anyway, how our cash costs are going to decline significantly, and then it, it declines even more, adding that extra 40%. So it was a very critical acquisition for us. We were asked a lot, and we have been asked over the last two years. As we were building Greenstone, you know, everybody wondered, "Well, what else are you going to do? What other M&A are you going to do? You're looking at this company or that company." And we said, "No, we're building Greenstone." That's going to deliver more than we could probably get from any other acquisition. And we have 40% that we hope we're going to acquire. Orion owned it. We had no idea one day we're going to sell it, but we knew they were going to sell it.
We also had no idea whether we were going to be the buyer. You know, they actually ran a competitive process last fall. We just hoped that we had the connections, the goodwill, the relationships, and the ability to pay the price that Orion expected, which ultimately we did. You can see this slide on the right, pardon me, the graph on the right, the earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization of that extra 40%. It's really a very material add to our cash. And it will enhance our diversification, adding to a top-tier mining jurisdiction, Northern Ontario, Canada, which will de-risk some of the production we currently have in Brazil and Mexico, and even the U.S., the Western U.S. We're California's largest gold producer by far, and we have a large mine in Mexico.
We have four mines in Brazil. We love those jurisdictions. Mexico right now is a bit wobbly. It's a government that's not a great fan of mining. And just because of that, you know, that's when you want the diversification. Who's to say that Canada is going to be great forever? In which case, it's pretty nice to be in Brazil, maybe. But today, Canada is seen as one of the world's leading mining jurisdictions, particularly Ontario, and we're absolutely delighted to be there. We've had total support from the Indigenous communities at Greenstone, the government of Ontario, the local region, it's just been great.
We contrast that to the challenges sometimes we've had in places like Mexico, and I believe this addition to now 52% of our net asset value coming from Canada. I think we all feel much more comfortable in terms of management and our shareholdership, too. Okay, where does this get us? This is the slide I think that. You know, I showed the same slide last year. So we overperformed last year. That's fine. We're gonna do this again. I'm gonna tell you, we're gonna do this again. We're going to, as soon as we kind of get over this Q1 kind of messiness, I'm gonna say, which was kind of noisy and not spectacular, and that'll come soon.
We get Greenstone open, Q2, Q3, Q4 should be better, much better, I hope. And, you know, we're going to start bridging this gap, because right now we are among the cheapest gold stocks in the universe, and we have the fastest, the highest growth profile, we have among the highest production, and we have among the highest reserves. And believe me, on those metrics, we'll count eventually. I'm not sure when, I expect later this year, but they will count, and they - that will be driving our value proposition for all of our shareholders. I've already talked about Greenstone. Why is it important? 400,000 ounces a year, 14-year mine life, one of the highest grade, large open-pit gold mines anywhere, large reserve base, large reserve space. It will become one of Canada's largest gold mines.
And here you can also see the little blue triangle there. What that is is the average grade, the head grade, going into the mill of these big gold mines. You can see Detour Lake, Malartic. We know they're known as the Meadow bank, but certainly, the Detour Lake, Malartic, Côté, Blackwater are all much lower grade than Greenstone, and that just means it's going to be a high, lower cost producer. And you can see on this slide here how it ranks in world gold mines. It's going to be in the lower quartile of gold cash costs, and that's going to drive the whole cash cost, all-in sustaining cost structure of Equinox Gold down further and further. Lots of opportunity.
I'm not going to talk to these slides particularly, but I just want to say if you're interested in kind of the mine life or the expansion potential beyond 14 years, have a look at these slides, particularly if you're technically related, technically interested, both the underground deposit right at Greenstone, and then the next slide is the belt. We have about a 100-kilometer belt full of known gold mineralization, old mines. I'm gonna highlight the Brookbank mine, for example, where we already have 600,000-ounce high-grade gold resource. Those kind of things, over time, we're going to explore more, and I'm sure we're going to have these add to the Greenstone mine production for the very long term. So it's a prolific belt of gold producers.
Our exploration team is going to get to work as soon as we, as soon as they get down on this, as soon as we actually have a little bit more cash relief that we're gonna spend on our de-leveraging and throw some money at the exploration team to expand the mines or, increase the mine life. Okay, now guidance. We've, we've announced this already. Our pro forma 2024 guidance, including the 40% of Greenstone that we're acquiring, will deliver about 780,000 ounces of gold, ±. Obviously, I hope it's on the plus side, but anyway, that's going to be our guidance for all 8 mines. And the cash costs is going to be in the range of $1,285-$1,390, all-in sustaining costs $1,585, $1,565-$1,675.
Don't forget, this is a relatively simple calculation to calculate our free cash flow. It's the gold price, times the gold production, minus our gold production, times our all-in sustaining costs. So the margin is what we have left over for, you know, for non-sustaining capital, for dividends, you know, that comes through debt repayments, and for corporate overhead. Okay, so talking about the, you know, what we talked about last year, we called ourselves the growliest gold company in the market because we have all this growth in front of us, and we don't have to buy anything new. We don't have to, we don't have to build anything new, specifically other than what we already have in our portfolio. Four big growth prospects. Greenstone, we've already talked about.
Aurizona Mine, this wall, this sheet of underground mineralization below the old pit, that we're going to start working on this fall or winter, early next year. We're going to go underground, open it up, and start supplemental feed to the old pit production we have already. That'll add about 20,000 ounces a year for a long life. Castle Mountain, phase two, that'll add about 200,000. And that's in the middle of a permitting phase right now, which we have been working on for 3 or 4 years, and we are going to work on for, I think, another couple of years. That's the best guess right now. And then, of course, build an open pit, the Castle Mountain gold mine there. It's just out of Las Vegas. It's a brownfield site.
We have all the permits we need to in terms of the land, we just need to have the environmental impact statement and the permit for the new construction. So that's going to take another couple of years. And then Los Filos. Los Filos has been a bit of a problem child for us since we acquired it. I would say it's through no fault of ours, because during COVID, it was very hard to manage some of the social issues there. But we worked very hard on that, and really, we need a new social contract with the three communities at Los Filos. Maurice and I were down there just last week. We met one of the community's leaders. We opened up a health clinic there.
We're going to open up a water treatment plant this fall, sorry, a water plant, giving people bottled water this fall. Really, I think we're creating a new dialogue with the three communities that we need to work with so much and get out of this sort of very high-cost contracts that we've had to live with, that we inherited from previous operators. We have to reboot that. We call it Los Filos 2.0. And, I can't guarantee to show if we're going to do that. I spoke exactly the same way in January this year to a presentation in Toronto.
So I can't guarantee we're going to do it, but if we do it, the flip side is we will significantly expand production at Los Filos to add about 120,000 ounces a year, decrease our cash costs at Los Filos, which currently are reasonable, but we're going to drive them down even more, and most, more importantly, extend the mine life by about 10 or 15 years. It's a great ore body. It needs that new plant to maximize recoveries. Today, we're getting about 50%-55% recoveries on gold. It's very low grade. It's fine in a deep leach, but the future of Los Filos is higher grade underground mine. And we have a lot of resources there.
But to maximize recovery, to make that mine really efficient and not waste a lot of that gold, we have to get 90% recovery, not 50% recovery. And that is going to require this new mill. So our basic approach to the communities is to say, "You know what? The large scale surface mine is pretty much over. It's not entirely over, but it's certainly late stage. It's been going for 15 years. The future of this mine is more underground mining and higher grade mining, better recoveries. But to do that, it's going to require two things: It's going to require new investment by us, which will guarantee jobs for 10 or 20 years, almost all the local people who are currently working in the mine and new suppliers.
It also is going to require a new social contract with the three communities." So we're very hard at work on that, and, we're hopeful that that will be successful in 2024 into 2025. So we're very active on it right now. So all of this, coming back to what I said right at the start, is going to drive a revaluation of Equinox Gold as a senior producer, not as a mid-tier, not as a junior, but as a senior producer, which is what we'll get to when we exceed 1 million ounces of gold per year at lower cash costs. Obviously, scale, liquidity, diversity, more cash flow, more deleveraging, less debt, all of these things together, build that case for a better price to net asset value multiple of 0.74 today to sort of 1.3.
That's why scale matters by itself. Size matters in this business. Just a short slide here on how we are aligned. Obviously, I'm a large shareholder personally. We have every one of our senior managers who are significant shareholders, relative to their own net worth. And, and, and yet beyond that, we have, we have a breadth of shareholding base, incredible liquidity. We trade an average of 3 or 4 million shares a day just on the U.S. exchange, another million or so on Canada. I'm very—When we did the $299 million equity financing recently, how much of that was bought by institutions? How was that distributed?
Oh, I think at least three quarters were institutional, maybe one quarter was retail.
How many different institutions?
30.
So big institutions then, and then the rest is retail spread across Canada and Europe, and U.S., of course. So very much aligned to shareholders. If we do well, you know, we all do well. Okay, here's our targets for 2024, and we're certainly on track for this so far. We're five months into the year already, absolutely on track. And I hope a year from now, we can say we're gonna continue on track. Number one, number two, and number three are Greenstone. Obviously, that is critical to us, and we are on the cusp of starting gold production. And we really hope to have it by today, as I said, but it's going to be in May.
It will be in May, we were assured by our general manager yesterday, and, a bunch of us are heading up there next week to, to confirm that. We have, you know, we have our day. Anyway, so ramp up commercial production in Q3, and then try to get to 90% through by the end of the year. That's our base plan. That's what you can hold us to here. Operations, obviously, renegotiate Los Filos community agreements. I've talked about hit our guidance and continue to excel. We do have a, a growing reputation now of excellence in, responsible safety, environmental, and social performance, and I'm going to talk about that in just a sec because I need to dwell on that a little bit.
Continue in this amazing program that I will say, we've had a tremendous relationship with Bravada, our value mining investment company who has supported us with finance and also some technical horsepower during this asset optimization program to increase the efficiencies and reduce costs. What have we got last year, guys? $60 million in savings?
$52 million.
$52 million. $52 million, and what's our target for this year?
$60 million
$60 million. So these are real savings, and it's just better thinking, better operations. It's very impressive. Exploration, I've talked about. Target is to replace reserves and grow resources. Development, Aurizona, Castle Mountain, Mesquite. Now, Mesquite's at the end of its life. It's been a successful gold mine. It's produced more than 5 million ounces for 30+ years, and we want it to continue. So we're doing a bunch of work on permitting. We know there's gold in Moore Boulder. We have to get permits, and sometimes that's a real challenge in California to do it quickly. Eventually, usually it comes, but it's a challenge quickly. So those are our challenges at Mesquite, but it's been a great mine for us since we acquired it 6 years ago. We acquired it, by the way, 6 years ago.
We had a three-year mine life, and it's been running for six years. So it's been absolutely repaid its original cost multiple times. It's been a great mine. Okay, a couple of words on the gold market, and I'll try to make this relatively brief. I've been very bullish on gold. That's why I supported Greg and the team when we started Equinox. That's why we put it together, because for me, it's my last company. You know, I love silver, Pan American. I retired from Pan American, and I just sort of wanted one last company. And because I was bullish on gold, and because I wanted a public company, an equity, you know, you want to build a big gold producer.
That if you build a big gold producer with big gold production, big reserves, and resources, you get big bang for the buck if the gold price goes up. And that's what's going on because we're having this remarkable... You know, we started Equinox Gold with $1,300 an ounce, and then it went down to $1,250 or something, $1,200 right away. That, that was a bit worrisome. But since then, it's been on this tear, and the tear, if anything, is getting stronger right now. We had a kind of a 2021, 2022, 2023, it was sort of bouncing around $2,000, $1,800 in that range, but now it's just had this wonderful run. Nobody really knows when it's gonna, you know, peter out.
It will eventually, but Goldman Sachs, you know, pretty big firm, pretty well known, they just they put out a report a week or two ago, saying their prediction for gold in 2024 is to end the year $2,700-$3,000 an ounce, which that's, that's nice to hear. Now, why is that? Well, it's an interesting thing. I mean, there's no real reason gold should go down. We've had no big discoveries, no... There's a little bit of gold production growth last year, but really, it's been 10 years, and the gold market has been almost static in supply. So if you have increase in demand and you have static supply, with anything, you have a higher price. That's basically economics.
It's odd, I think most people who are gold observers, and this, I'll come back to this in a minute. Most people who are gold observers would say gold should perform poorly in a high interest environment. It should perform poorly if there's a strong U.S. dollar. But in fact, gold has done really well in that environment. And this all started. Really, it started with the use by the United States of sort of using the U.S. dollar as a weapon after Russia invaded Ukraine. And that kind of woke certain countries up, India and China, saying they wanted to diversify away from the U.S. dollar. So it wouldn't happen to them, and one of their diversification strategies was gold.
So the Chinese Central Bank has been the largest, by far, buyer of gold in the market, regardless of this rather negative macro outlook of higher interest rates and a strong U.S. dollar, and a tight Fed, right? So all of the gold pundits and the gold, you know, the hedge funds and all these smart, you know, rocket scientist investors, they all bet against the higher gold price because they knew, you know, the U.S. dollar was strong, interest rates are high, they're typically bearish for gold. So they sold all the gold equities, and they went short. But the Chinese, and the Turks, and the Poles, and the Kazakhs, and a whole pile of central banks were buying gold as a long-term store of value, which is precisely what it's been for 5,000 years.
Gold is a long-term store of value. That's its first, second, and third use. It protects investors from fluctuations in governments and crazy people doing crazy things, like causing paper currency to devalue. Gold keeps its value. So in the face of all that negativist on gold by all these experts, guess what? Gold went against that trend, and it was a fundamental, fundamental move. So gold trading volumes increased, investors switched asset classes. We also had some geopolitical tensions of course, which always helped gold a little bit. But it's mostly been the central bank buying. And now in 2024, it looks like the big driver is also a lot of, of retail buying, particularly in China, of gold. They love gold.
They can buy it now in small amounts, but small amounts times 1.3 billion people is a big amount, right? That's one of the big drivers to gold this year. Central banks are still buying gold. We had the numbers come out from global central banks just a couple of days ago. China is still buying. They were big buyers in Q1, and all of that is driving the price of gold to new highs. Now, what's gonna change? I mean, is inflation going to go up? No, inflation is coming down. Inflation has been our biggest enemy in the mining industry, because unfortunately, although the gold prices increase our revenues, our costs have also gone up, right?
Everything over the last couple of years, since really 2021, 2020, a lot of it was COVID-related supply chain stuff. But generally speaking, inflation has been a real negative to almost everybody, but particularly mining companies. Cyanide costs have gone up, fuel prices have gone up. The Brazil and Mexican currencies have been relatively strong. That hasn't helped us. So labor costs are relatively up, but I see that trend slowing down. I think Doug would say probably cyanide costs might come down a little bit for Greenstone, for example, and other mines. Diesel prices are going to come down a little bit if the oil price drops, and if inflation drops down, it's gonna help us.
It's gonna bring some of our costs down at the same time, maybe, as revenues go up, which would be a happy world. So interest rates not likely to go up. That's bullish for gold. Interest rates, pardon me, yeah, interest rates, inflation, interest rates are likely to go down, bullish for gold. U.S. dollar is probably going to weaken if gold goes up because it's no longer tightening. It's going to weaken. That's bullish for gold. And global unrest, it's gonna keep going. It's not gonna stop. That's bullish for gold. So I just don't see why gold would go down, particularly. You know, I mean, it could. It's a bit of a wild animal and so are a lot of people. But that's...
You know, the outlook for gold is pretty good right now, and so I could see gold staying where it is or even a lot better, and the futures market certainly show that. We are looking at doing some collars right now, where you get a put price, be $2,200-$3,000, Nick? Yeah, about that. So we can, we can sell gold right now, stay for the next 12 months, with a floor. It doesn't cost anyone to do this. It's a... So sell, sell put, buy calls, and, you get a floor of $2,200 and a, and a, and a ceiling of $3,000. Never in my career has anything like that come close to happening with gold prices.
So it's a great time for gold, and those numbers are telling us that many people think gold is coming up. Okay, in this context, why this is important for us is because as gold prices go up, we have what we call leverage. That's exactly why we started this company and tried to get, get, get big. The more gold production you have, the more reserves and resources you have in your books, the greater your value. And that is... It's not a linear equation, by the way, it's sort of an exponential one. So the leverage side is as gold goes up, you know, 5%, we should have a 30% increase in our operating margins. That's leverage, and that's why we should be performing at a much higher rate.
We should be trading at a much higher rate than we are today. We did okay. This is the range of January 2023 to April 2024, and a lot of that trend off the peak was because we just sold, you know, 55 million shares to new investors, and that's always been difficult to digest, and it'll be through that sort of digestion period in a month or two, I think. But that's kind of one of the reasons it's come up. It's out there relative to some of our peers. Otherwise, we've outperformed everyone, and it's been a pretty satisfying. Why? Because we have the leverage. That's why. And on the right here, you see this really crazy, strange disconnect. The disconnect between the yellow, which is the gold price, and the blue, which are average prices of gold producers like Agnico Eagle.
This is the GDX Gold Miners ETF. So it's not just Agnico Eagle. This is the entire industry. Newmont, the biggest gold producer in the world. Barrick, second biggest gold producer in the world. Until about two months ago, until the gold really had its, had its run, they were trading where they traded five years ago. They did this, this, this run, like we did, and then, poof, down they came, right back to where they were, even though gold's gone up, you know, significantly in that period. So none of these companies have had the benefit of this running gold, neither large ones or small ones. Well, how long are these disconnects likely to last? Is it going to be a month? Is it going to be a year? Nobody knows. But my guess is, these don't last forever.
This relationship has been odd for 18 months or even maybe a couple of years, since the Ukraine war started and gold price started going. But it's gonna, you know, things will revert to traditional correlation as it should. Gold price should be correlated to the equity price of the gold prices. It always has been. It should always will. But for some reason, it's been out of sync. It's only gonna correct by gold coming down or the equity prices going up. And my bet is equity prices are gonna go up, which is gonna be a happy day for all Agnico Eagle shareholders, and in fact, all shareholders of every gold company on the planet, public company.
The last slide, just a summary really, of why 2024 is going to be a great year for this company. We have this great exposure and increase in exposure. We have, Greenstone starting up. I've talked a lot about why that's, going to be positive for us. It's happening right now. Increased cash flow, lower operating costs, and I, and I'm gonna say not only at Greenstone, but it should, it should work through all of our other mines, too. Q1 is typically a poor quarter for us. It's the same last couple of years. Certainly, the same this year. We expect much better production latter part of the year, which will translate to lower costs, more cash flow, and so on.
Then, of course, Greenstone will transform us into a really large gold, you know, gold, gold producer on the global stage. So none of this could happen without tremendous support from shareholders, from bankers, quite frankly, doing this $500 million bank financing, you know, in a very short period of time is extraordinary. We've had support from so many people, and my thanks to all of them. The last thing I'm going to say is this book. You've got a hard copy. We just announced yesterday, we just posted it on the website, right? It's called Environmental, Social, and Governance Report 2023, Building on Strong Foundations. And it's a very, very detailed, amazing product, and I compliment everybody involved in this, everybody. Because...
I'd really like our shareholders to read it, just to see what we do on the non-production side, on the non, you know, money side. We are good citizens. We have a ridiculously good health and safety record. You know, I mean, from a certain amount of experience in this industry, we are among the top performers in the entire gold industry from the standpoint of health and safety. It's remarkable. We have about 8,000 employees, as I said. We have underground mines, open-pit mines. They're inherently dangerous and risky. Despite all of that, we have got this really, really outstanding safety record, and I take my hat off to everybody who is part of making that happen. It doesn't happen by accident, it happens by good management.
Teresa is our ESG committee chair, and I thank her and all of her committee, and the work that everybody does. We are good community citizens. We reward our communities with water plants, with better roads, better communications, better health facilities. We really try to work together with people and not in some kind of independent way, without connection to the communities that we need to support. And they need - they need. They support us, we support them. Just one thing after another, anti-slavery discussion here, biodiversity protection, environmental protection, our commitments, our record. It's a really great book, and I really recommend it to all of our shareholders. I hope you'll do what I do when I read it.
I just feel good about being part of this company, and I hope all of our employees and our suppliers feel the same, and our shareholders. If you have a chance to read it, it's on the website. We just posted it yesterday. Please have a look at it. And with that, I think I'll... That was a rather long presentation. A politician. A rather long presentation. It's a happy story, notwithstanding, you know, today's results are extraordinary, but that's. I've already talked about that. And it's a happy story, good people, good progress, on the cusp of a real transformation. I think I'll just end there and open to questions.
Yeah, we do have a few questions online. Are there any questions from the room before we take the online questions?
Good evening, Mr. Chairman. I'm very happy to be here. Wonderful presentation, lot of good news, and I appreciate it that. I've been on board for between 4 and 5 years, and so I look back on, let's just say 4 years ago today, and our company has managed to lose 40% of its shareholder value. At the same time, our gold has gone up 35%. Now, that's a remarkable performance, and I just wonder, is that the cost of being a high growth company, or is there something else going on in our company that we need to know?
Yeah, a great question, and it's, it's still a tough question. I think what I said about Newmont and Barrick, if you have a look at just about any gold producer across the board, you'll see exactly that, that decline in value, shareholder value. It's, it's remarkable. Not every single company, but on average, that's just been the record. The last... Well, the last, say, three years.
Newmont is down 10% this year, not 40.
Yeah, not forty, but again, you're starting at a point where we had that glorious run right at the start, right? It went from $5 to $15, and that was pretty remarkable, but it was unsustainable. You know, a lot of that was because we got into these big ETFs that drove automatic share buying beyond fundamentals. These, these ETFs had to buy tens of billions of shares, without regard to fundamentals. On a fundamental basis, we might have gone to, say, $10 a share or $9 a share. Instead, we went to fifteen.
Yeah.
Of course, when we came off that peak, when we lost that buying and the gold market deteriorated, that's what happened. I don't... I mean, okay, so that was one reason. I would also say we faced real challenges in some of our big gold mines, our Los Filos mine in Mexico. Communities went on strike. They blockaded the mine for a long time. You can't possibly have shareholder value creation when you have a mine that's blockaded because then you run risk, you have costs. And that was the way it was. 2022, as I said, it was a tough year. Last year was a pretty good year. This year's going to be a great year. That's where we are.
I think also the only last thing I'd say is, and I'll maybe ask Greg to chime in, if you have anything to add, this year, while we had a pretty good run, we then came off that high because we did that big raise. It was a part of a large equity financing, and that always hurts your stock price for a while. Hang on. A year from now, come back and let's see how we do.
I'm not selling, don't worry.
I think-
Thank you.
No, I, I guess I'll only say it's four years ago today. We had just closed the Leagold transaction. The company had gotten a lot larger. We hit that COVID sort of related upswing, and a lot of gold stocks experienced that up until August of 2020. A couple of things happened in August of 2020. The entire market turned over, and we did have some challenges that manifested in Mexico. Then the next thing we did is we acquired Premier Gold. We announced that in December of 2020. One of the things our company's been in a growth mode, as Ross said. Greenstone was a fairly large asset to buy. We did have a lot of people that doubted us.
Companies that are in the construction phase, development phase, growth phase, tend to trade at a lower multiple because there's a higher degree of risk, and you're spending a bunch of money while you're not earning it. And we've kind of been in that mode for a long time on a very, very significant asset at Greenstone. And now, finally, you know, all these years later, just kind of gone through that construction period. We're now bringing it into production just as these historically strong gold prices are coming, very bullish outlooks for gold. So, you know, I'm hoping we can have some of that performance that we had back in 2020, when we were sort of firing on all cylinders, having just done that deal.
So it's been a very volatile four years, and it just so happens, if you go back exactly four years from now, we were on a massive tear and actually way outperformed in 2020, up until that point. And then, you know, had some challenges, and in 2023, got back to sort of outperformance, and hopefully we can maintain that in 2024.
So if Brownlee has 30 seconds, I buttonholed off 2 years ago at the AGM. I got a lot of writing on this, and he said, "Not as much as I do." Yeah. I just did the numbers, too. If you, if you go 4 years ago to the GDXJ, which is this average of gold producers, they're all down an average of 34% in the last until today, 34%, average. Some have gone down 70, some have gone down 10. I think the ones that went down 10. Yeah, good. Any other questions?
Got a few online. So it's funny, you've mentioned Newmont a few times. At the very beginning of the call, someone said, "Why should somebody invest in Equinox Gold rather than a Newmont or a GDX?
Well, leverage. It's all about leverage. It's all about leverage on all things being equal, which the thing is, all things are never equal. So on average, a company like Equinox should way outperform Newmont because Newmont has another growth period, so it doesn't have the growth. It has, it has very large production base, it has relatively low cash costs. The companies that should do better, all things being equal, in a rising gold market, are companies that have high costs and growing production. And we hit both of those right now. Over time, we're going to be less leveraged to gold because we'll have lower cash costs. But right now, we have extremely high leverage to gold, much higher than Newmont.
Therefore, unless there are extrinsic things like bubbles or bursts or problems at any one of our mines or Newmont's mines, on a company by company basis, we ought to perform, we ought to outperform.
I'm going to sort of combine these into two questions here. So once Greenstone's ramped up to full production, you know, what are your plans to optimize the portfolio? And do you have any other M&A activities planned, or are you going to focus on debt reduction?
Pass that over to Greg.
I mean, I'd say no near-term plans, really. Greenstone, especially with 100%, is going to be, as Ross said, over 50% of our mining net asset value. And so, focusing on execution at Greenstone is the most important thing we can do, one, two, and three. We definitely want to de-leverage over time, especially right now with interest rates being high, and pay to park our free cash on our revolving credit facility and start to reduce our overall debt. And, you know, we just got Greenstone built. I think we'd like to realize some of the value that we believe is going to come from executing well on Greenstone. And in the longer term, of course, I mean, we're a gold company. We want to get bigger over time.
As you mine your, your deposits, you've got to mine new resources at your existing mines or find new mines. So I would never, I would never disregard future M&A, but we just bought 40% of Greenstone for $990 million. We just did a big transaction, so let us digest that, and then we can think about what we might do in the future.
I'll say, just to add to that, you know, people are always asking, "Well, what about dividends?" And I think, again, the answer is pretty much always the same. When you have free cash flow, you have the happy choice about either put it into growth or return to shareholders. And the right answer, if you have a lot of free cash flow is both. Want to do both. Right now, we don't have a lot of free cash flow. We're going to use it to reduce our debt position first, but at some point in the not-too-distant future, it's absolutely on the horizon. We will be able to initiate our dividend. Absolutely on the horizon.
All right. Any other questions from the group? A couple of very specific questions online. I'll get back to you by email. I prefer to have Ross focus on vision and strategy. So with nothing else online, I guess we'll get closing remarks, please.
Okay. I don't have any closing remarks. I've already said too much, I think. Thank you all for joining us today, and, and I look forward to being here a year from now, talking about, how much we have performed against Newmont, not to mention everyone else, so we can finally deliver better returns to our shareholders. Thank you very much. Right, thank you.