Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to welcome you to the 2022 Annual and Special Meeting of the shareholders of Franco-Nevada Corporation. My name is David Harquail, and as Chair of the Board of Directors of the company, I will chair the formal portion of this meeting. Following that, Paul Brink, on my right here, our President and CEO, will provide some remarks and take your questions. Thank you for joining us today. Actually, after three years of not having in-person meeting, I was actually wondering if we would have anybody here, and I was questioning the expense of, you know, hiring a large hall like this, but it's been well worth it. It's good to have some friends here. See so much of the management team participating as well. So thank you for coming.
For those of you that sent in your proxies, thank you for that as well. This meeting is a hybrid one, so this is why we have all this extra technology today, allowing for both in-person and virtual participation. It's our first one, so bear with us if there's some technical glitches. Here are a few logistics for the meeting. If you're on the webcast, detailed instructions are displayed on how to vote your shares and ask questions and get technical assistance if necessary. If you're on the phone line, please note you cannot vote or ask questions. I would now like to introduce some of the people in the room here today. At the head table, Paul Brink, our CEO and President, Sandip Rana, our Chief Financial Officer, and Lloyd Hong, our Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary.
I'd also like to introduce some members of the leadership team that we have here in attendance. We have Eaun Gray, our Senior Vice President. If you could just stand, raise your hand. Of Business Development. Vice President of Diversified. All of our directors are present this afternoon in person or by webcast. I'd like to introduce our d irectors and would ask each of them to stand as I say their names. Tom Albanese, Derek Evans, Dr. Catharine Farrow, Louis Gignac, Maureen Jensen. Sorry, Louis, I should have given you more time. Jennifer Maki, and Randall Oliphant. Not here in person, but joining us virtually is from Texas, is Elliott Pew . We have a slide picture of him here, but not a live one.
He's been with us all day as we've been doing our board meetings and committee meetings, so I know he's participating. The new Franco-Nevada will be celebrating its fifteenth anniversary as a public company at the end of this year. Over time, change is inevitable. We've been carefully reviewing both the board and the executive team DNA of what has made us so successful. At our in-person meeting at AGM in 2018, we marked the retirement of our director and friend, Graham Farquharson. He was the original sole director of the newly incorporated Franco-Nevada when we started in October of 2007. He was a core part of making Franco-Nevada a success, and he loved this company. Even though he was past retirement age, he stayed involved as an honorary director and attended many of our meetings and dinners.
He provided our team with his technical views on many of our potential investments and saved us from potential disasters at the same time. This week, Graham passed away at the age of 81. Graham was a statesman of the Canadian mining industry. He was an inductee of the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame, and just last year was awarded an Order of Canada. I have to see whether he was able to participate in that ceremony. I don't know if he was able to. Most important of all to us, he was a member of the Franco-Nevada family, and he will be missed. At our last in-person AGM in 2019, we welcomed Jennifer Maki to the board, and later that year, Euan R. Pugh. At our virtual meeting in 2020, we welcomed Maureen Jensen.
At the same time, Pierre Lassonde stepped down as Chair and Director of our company, and I stepped into his role. Pierre was a co-founder of the new Franco-Nevada and a big part of our success. We had planned a super large party that year. We had all the bookings done, lots of people coming from out of town, as you know, but things couldn't happen in May of 2020. As I stepped into the role of Chair in Pierre's place, Paul Brink stepped into my role as President and CEO and became a Director of the company. He's done all those roles ably since then, and you will hear from Paul shortly. Finally, at our AGM in 2021, we thanked the Honorable David Peterson for his service as a Director since the founding of this company.
He was a friend to us all, and his advice and mentorship were hugely appreciated. As you can see, there's been substantial renewal that has been undertaken already, and we'll be carefully taking further steps while respecting what makes Franco-Nevada successful. We'll now move on to the formal part of our meeting. Instructions on how to participate on the webcast will appear on the screen. I will now ask Lloyd Hong to act as Secretary of the meeting and Paul Allen and Jamie Brazdik as representatives of Computershare to act as scrutineers. The scrutineers will report on the number of shares represented at this meeting by proxy. Proof of service of notice of calling the meeting has been filed.
I directed a copy of the notice and affidavit providing service thereof be annexed to the minutes of this meeting. I've been advised there is a quorum and request that the scrutineer's report be annexed to the minutes of the meeting. I therefore declare that this meeting is regularly called and properly constituted for the transaction of business. We will conduct the votes on the matters before us by poll. On a poll, each shareholder is entitled to vote on the matter and has one vote in respect of each share entitled to be voted on the matter and held by that shareholder. I would now ask Lumi to open the polls to webcast voting on all the matters of business for this meeting and to keep the polls open until after all the items of business have been presented, and I've asked for the polls to be closed.
For those shareholders present in person, you should have been provided with a ballot form if you are registered with the scrutineers on your arrival. If you are a registered holder or a duly appointed proxy holder and have not received a ballot form, please raise your hand and one will be provided to you. If you are participating on the webcast and have any questions on the items of this business, please type in your question or comment in the messaging section of the Lumi platform. Now, as there is a delay between the live meeting and the webcast, and Lloyd Hong will re-read the question aloud. To ask a live question, please enter your telephone number and question in the messaging section of the Lumi platform, and a member of the Lumi team will call you to connect you to the meeting.
We're gonna see if all this works. I hope we can test it. If your questions are more general in nature, I would ask that you please wait until the formal part of the business has been concluded, as Paul will be conducting a Q&A session at the end, and we'll be happy to take it then. After all the matters of business have been presented and the voting has been closed, I'll ask Computershare to tabulate the results and report them to the meeting. First matter of business is to confirm receipt of the financial statements and the auditor's report, consolidated financial statements of the company and its subsidiaries for the year ended December 31, 2021, and the reports of the directors and auditors thereon have been mailed to all shareholders who requested them together with a notice of meeting.
The financial statements are also available on our website, and you can request paper copies by phone or by email. The next matter of business is the election of directors. I would like now, like, to turn to the election of directors. The nominees and management of the company were identified in the information circular mailed to each shareholder of the company. I introduced the directors earlier and had them stand. Will someone please nominate the directors? Given that they've already stood, we're gonna forego standing again, and the 10 directors are required to be nominated. Could I have that?
Mr. Chairman, my name is Eaun Gray, and I'm a shareholder of the company. I nominate David Harquail, Paul Brink, Tom Albanese, Derek Evans, Catharine Farrow, Louis Gignac, Maureen Jensen, Jennifer Maki, Randall Oliphant, and Elliott Pew as directors of the company to hold office until the next annual meeting of shareholders or until successors are elected in accordance with.
Mr. Chairman, my name is Chris Bell, and I am a shareholder of the company. I second the nominations.
Thank you very much. Are there any questions?
There are no questions on the webcast.
No questions from the webcast as well. I declare the nominations closed. The next matter of business is the appointment of the company's auditors. Will someone please move a motion for the appointment of auditors and to authorize the directors to fix the remuneration of the auditors?
Mr. Chairman, my name is Jason O'Connell, and I'm a shareholder of the company. I move that PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Chartered Accountants be appointed auditors of the company until the next annual meeting at such remuneration as may be fixed by the directors of the company. The directors being hereby authorized to fix such remuneration.
[audio distortion]
Thank you very much. Are there any questions?
There are no questions on the webcast.
No questions from the webcast either. There are no questions. We'll move on to the next item, which is the say on pay advisory resolution. Since the vote is advisory, it will not be binding on the board. However, the board will consider the outcome of the vote as part of its ongoing review of executive compensation matters. Will someone please move a motion for the say on pay advisory resolution?
[audio distortion] I'm a shareholder of the company. I move that on an advisory basis and not to diminish the role and responsibilities of the board of directors of the company, the shareholders accept the approach to executive compensation as disclosed in the company's management information circular dated March twenty-first, two thousand twenty-two.
Good. Can I have a seconder?
Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.
Are there any questions?
There are no questions on the webcast.
Okay. That was the final item of formal business for this meeting. If you have not yet voted on the motions that have been tabled, I would ask you that you now complete your voting. We'll pause briefly for final votes to come in. I'm told here to count to 10. We have so many multiple platforms here, we'll just, we'll make sure we receive these. Okay. My legal counsel says I'm okay to proceed. I declare the voting closed and would ask the polls to be closed and for Computershare to collect the physical ballots from those shareholders here in person and to tabulate the preliminary results of the voting. I'm told to count to 10 again. I'm waiting for his thumbs up. That will tell me when to proceed. Okay. That was only about 6 seconds. That's good.
Are there any other items of business that any shareholder in attendance would like to raise? Is there anything from the webcast?
Nothing from the webcast.
Seeing none, the formal business of this meeting has now been completed, and my job is done. We have received the preliminary results, and I declare that each of the motions in this meeting has been carried by no less than 90% of the votes, including the election of directors. I declare the persons nominated have been duly elected as directors of Franco-Nevada Corporation. The final results of the meeting will be reported on SEDAR by tomorrow. Congratulations, directors. With that, having done my job, I'll now pass it over to Paul Brink to entertain you, and he'll provide both his remarks and will take your questions. Thank you very much.
Thank you, David. Welcome, everybody. Please heed the cautionary statement. I will be making some forward-looking statements. As David had mentioned, this is our 15th AGM. Later in the year will be the 15th anniversary of our business. The reason I put the big 15 was, as I was reflecting on that, we have been in the royalty business in the new Franco as long as the old Franco was in the business. It was 1986 that Pierre and Seymour bought the first royalty on Goldstrike. It was 2001 that they negotiated the deal with Newmont. It's amazing how fast time has gone, that we now have been in the business the same amount of time. We set out 15 years ago with the objective of creating a low-risk gold investment to hedge against market volatility.
We're very proud of what we've been able to achieve over that period. Our CAGR is approaching 20%, outperforming all the market benchmarks, the high-flying NASDAQ stocks, the overall market, the S&P, gold bullion, and remarkable that during that period, the GDX or the index, mostly of the gold operating stocks, has been relatively flat. This is a snapshot of the performance of the company over that time, and you can see whether it's by geos, by revenue, by market cap, all of those have increased in the order of 6-8 times. I'll point you to the bottom right-hand corner of the chart there, where you'll see that our EBITDA in 2021 is now exceeding more than $1 billion a year.
With the growth in the business, we've been able to increase the dividend that we pay 15 times consecutively. Last year, we increased the dividend 15%. This year, we increased the dividend in the order of 7%, but we moved it a quarter earlier, so in effect, about a 10% increase in the dividend year-over-year. The objective on the dividend is to keep it sustainable, first of all, and second, progressive. When we look at the yields that our investors are achieving now, those that invested at the IPO, for Canadian investors, it's more than a 10% yield and getting close to 8.5% yield for our US investors. I'll turn a bit to our business model. Two main elements, both with royalties and streams, they're just two key things.
One, they're top-line interests. The top-line interest, it means it's more stable, it's high margin, but in particular, you don't have a cost element, so you're not subject to cost inflation. The second thing about them is they're non-operating interests, so you're not subject to the risk of capital calls. Management are not operating assets day to day, so you can focus on growing the business. Also because you're not operating assets, you can build a much more diverse build. Despite not being an operating company, ESG is still a focus. Two elements. First, as we think about our investments, we are allocating capital on behalf of our shareholders. That means we need to take particular care when we're doing our due diligence to ensure that we're investing in operations that won't have an adverse impact on the environment and treat their communities well.
In particular on the communities, we are active. We do engage with our operators around their communities and make sure that we're doing our bit contributing to those communities to make sure that they're benefiting from the projects. The second side of ESG is how we think about it in terms of our business. The first is our alignment with our shareholders. The key thing at Franco has always been ownership, both the board and the management being owners of the stock, making sure that we are incentivized to drive the share price up and keep alignment with our shareholders.
The second part of that is being a good employer to all of our employees, and part of that is making sure that we have an inclusive workforce that we attract and retain diverse talent. We're proud that we've been recognized for our efforts on the ESG side. We are the number 1 ranked precious metal stock by Sustainalytics. We also receive top rankings from the other major ESG rating organizations. One of the elements that I mentioned earlier is a great attractiveness of our business, particularly as a gold business, is that we're largely not impacted by cost inflation. One, because of our top-line interests, the only material costs that we got that are impacted by inflation is our G&A. Our G&A is less than 3% of revenue.
With our energy investments, we actually have leverage to energy cost inflation that is driving much of the cost inflation in the industry. All of that means is when we have commodity price increases, our revenue increases move directly to our bottom line. Through 2021, our EBITDA margins were 84% and net profit margin more than 50%. Turning to the asset portfolio. We believe our business is unique, because we have both the largest royalty portfolio in the business, but also because of our streams. Speaking of the two elements, and first on the royalty side, we've been building that business, for upwards of 38 years between the old Franco-Nevada, the period at Newmont and the new Franco-Nevada. In total, there are more than 400 interests in that business.
It's in that portfolio that we have experienced so much optionality, many assets that have outperformed our expectations. To name a few, Gold Strike, Tasiast, Detour, all of those investments will be more than 100-baggers in terms of the optionality that they've provided to the company. The other side of the business is streaming. Our 4 largest streams are all on some of the world's largest copper assets. The beauty of those assets is, one, they provide a very stable stream of cash flow to the company. It's very long life cash flow, copper assets typically being so much larger than gold assets and more long-lived. Also these assets really illustrate the saying that great ore bodies get better.
All of these investments have done better than we expected at the time of our investments. Cobre Panama, the largest of them, has been built as a far larger mine than we originally imagined. Candelaria, when we did that transaction, had a 14-year mine life. In total now, that mine life is approaching 30 years. Both Antamina and Antapaccay have outperformed in terms of the production that we'd expected in the years since we've done those deals. We have the most diversified portfolio in the industry, whether you look at assets or operators. We have the least exposure to a single asset in the industry. We also have most of our assets in very good mining countries, 91% coming from the Americas.
We're also diversified in terms of our investments in precious metals, but also on the diversified side. What we have found is that openness to diversification has allowed us to pick good entry points into some other resources, and as a result, create greater exposure to resource optionality across the world's great resource deposits than we might be able to do just from precious metals. Lastly, speaking on our growth outlook, we put out our guidance along with our annual results. Typically five-year guidance, you'll see that we have good built-in growth in the business over the next five years. The principal driver of that is the expansion of Cobre Panama.
First Quantum is taking it up from 85 million tons per annum up to 100 million tons per annum, which they hope to achieve by the end of 2023. That growth is also supported by broad growth across the portfolio, coming both from mine expansions and also from new mines. Along with those mine expansions, one of the exciting ones is Detour. They have just put out new results with further deep exploration results on the deposit, and are now considering an underground mine at Detour, but has also indicated that they are looking at expanding it to greater throughput than they had previously contemplated. Stillwater is being expanded with the Blitz project. That'll see it go from in the order of 600,000 ounces a year up to 850,000 ounces a year.
Kinross is well advanced with their 24K expansion at Tasiast. They're currently at or around the 21,000 ton per day run rate, looking to go to 24 over the next couple of years. We'll also get good growth out of Subika, which is the southern portion of Newmont's Ahafo mine, where mining is moving onto our ground, and so we'll get growth. New mines coming on. The first of the list is Salares Norte, where Gold Fields is well advanced with the construction. Next up will be Greenstone or Hardrock, where they've started construction. We expect following on behind that will likely be Marathon Gold, Eskay Creek, and potentially the Stibnite Mine down in Idaho. We have a total of $1.6 billion of available capital, and that amount continues to grow.
We're generating in the order of $1 billion of cash, and that cash balance is building. Business development team is busy, a good strong pipeline, particularly looking at financing new gold projects. To conclude, what makes Franco-Nevada different? It takes me back to the time 15 years ago, I was working with Seymour Schulich when we were drafting the prospectus for the IPO of Franco-Nevada. I was rolling out the typical corporate boilerplate, and Seymour Schulich stopped me and he said, "You have to understand, Franco-Nevada is a special company." That was the start of my education. You know, what is it that makes Franco-Nevada special?
It is, first of all, management that considers themselves of owners of the company, that our incentive when we're looking at doing deals is not just to do, we get the share price up. The second is the board. A board that is the strongest technical board in the industry, but also a board with experience of so many industry cycles that we've got the patience to wait until we've got good points to spend our capital in the cycle. The third piece is how we think about capital availability, and it's putting a premium on financial flexibility over financial leverage. With that, I'll conclude, and would love to take any questions.
As a reminder, if you're participating on the webcast and have any questions, please type in your question or comment in the messaging section of the Lumi platform, and Lloyd Hong will read the question aloud. To ask a live question, please enter your telephone number and question in the messaging section of the Lumi platform, and a member of the Lumi team will call you to connect you to the meeting. First up, are there any questions from the floor?
Thank you. A question for you, Mr. Brink. With your increased revenue that you've been seeing and your significant cash position, will we be seeing a special dividend or perhaps a performance dividend coming in the future?
Thank you, and a good question. What we found with our business, and we are in a lot of respects an investment business, and over time have always found that there are good opportunities to put our capital to work. As I mentioned, so much of that is the patience, waiting for the right deals to come along, waiting for the right point in the cycle to make those investments. We think those are key to being a successful resource investor. We are happy to build up cash on the balance sheet. When we think back to the returns that we've been able to generate in our business, roughly close to a 20% CAGR, we still think the best use of that capital is investing in new assets. That'll be our principal use of cash.
Aside from that, we do plan to continue to increase the dividend so long as we can, but stick with sustainable and progressive.
Yeah, Paul, would splitting the mining and energy assets make sense? I'm thinking of the previous Franco-Nevada and Euro-Nevada combination. Any sense of that?
It is an interesting question and something that we have thought about over time. If we were to do that, it would again be to drive the share price higher. The sort of circumstance that you would need would be a strong oil and gas market. I have to say, we're approaching that, but you'd also wanna see an environment where you can get a high multiple on the cash flow for the oil and gas business. It is a possibility. I would say the most likely outcome here is that we retain those assets in our business. We like those assets. We think there's tremendous resource optionality. We're happy to have a bit of diversity in the business, and we're able to achieve a premium valuation on that.
We always keep an eye open to generating returns for shareholders and if we can actually drive the share price forward by realizing that value, we'd be open to it.
Mr. Brink, what is your long-term outlook for gold?
Well, I love that question. We have invited along to join us today and he will be presenting to our board this evening on the gold market, John Reade, the Senior Market Strategist at the World Gold Council. I'm gonna invite John to come up and to give his views on the gold market.
Can I have the microphone?
Mm-hmm.
I don't need it for the room itself, but obviously for the people dialed in.
Yeah.
Well, first of all, thank you very much, Paul, for the opportunity to talk about the outlook for gold in the long term, and for the invitation that has been extended to me by Franco-Nevada to talk at their board later. I guess one thing, how long have you got? Because I describe myself as the most boring dinner party guest on the planet because I've been in the gold business for 35 years, and I know an awful lot about a very narrow topic, but I'm not gonna bore you to death.
5 minutes.
Five minutes. I should start a stopwatch. I normally have to when David says that to me. All right. I think the first thing I'd say is that the outlook for gold, I personally think has never been more attractive in terms of how investors are accessing the market. The World Gold Council has been going about 30 years, and as I say, I've been in the business for 35. When we both started out, this was a market that was driven by jewelry demand. Central banks were selling, investors sometimes bought, sometimes sold, but it was a small component of the market. We've seen step changes in the gold market over the past 30 years. Investment is now a more important component of gold demand than jewelry. Makes up about 42% of demand over the last 10 years.
Jewelry is about 34%, and technology demands sort of 7%. Oh, of course, central banks are buying as well. The gold market's changed a lot. Investment is a much bigger component of it. I think there's still an enormous potential for investment to increase and to become a higher proportion of the gold market. One of the things that we've been doing is going out and speaking to investors and demonstrating the role that gold has in a portfolio as a source of returns, as a diversifier, and as an asset that really helps when bad things happen.
I think we're gonna see more investment demand coming forward. In terms of price, the work that we've done developing a valuation model for gold, which is published on our website, free to use, and I encourage you to go along and have a look, would suggest that the long-term outlook for gold is around 5% per annum increases on average. Now, what we've seen in the last couple of years, look at 2020. I don't think many people had a coronavirus pandemic in their playbook at the start of the year. The world went into a recession. Gold delivered a 25% return. 2021, a recovery in the global economy. Gold underperformed about 2% decline. Coming into this year, obviously we've been overtaken by the events with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It's not going to be an easy ride as it's 5-odd% return. I think the second thing I'd say as well is we based this valuation model, this price estimation tool off the events of the last 30 years. I think what we've seen demonstrated over the last couple of years is that the inflation genie is now out of the bottle. I think what we've seen from the invasion of Ukraine has been a demonstration of what happens when globalization reverses, when you can no longer access markets like you used to be able to, and you start to get supply interruptions, which we first saw during the coronavirus pandemic. Now those interruptions and the threats of more interruptions to come really moving commodity prices, contributing materially to inflation.
Now, I don't have a crystal ball when it comes to the war. I don't know how things are gonna play out, but I think we can certainly see a couple of trends. One of which is that commodity prices are going to be higher and more volatile. I think the second thing is that economic growth globally will probably be lower than it was before. That combination of two factors, higher inflation and slowing growth, pushes the world more towards stagflation. Stagflationary conditions have increased. One of the pieces we wrote last year on stagflation and different types of inflation showed how gold and other asset classes perform in the different periods, whether it's Goldilocks, whether it's deflation, and then you look at stagflation. Gold and other commodities perform very well in absolute terms during stagflationary conditions, and particularly well in relative terms as well.
Whatever the outcome, I think that we see out of Ukraine, the world has moved towards a more stagflationary environment, and that probably means that it's going to be a positive environment for gold and other commodities. I would refer us to our website to read more, to contact us directly. As you might have gathered, I love talking about gold. Thank you.
John, thank you. Very much appreciated. We'll see now if there are any questions via the webcast. Lloyd?
I have one question from a Mr. George Fedorov. Is there any interest in exploring mineral production in North America currently dominated by China? Example, rare earths and/or those required for new energy.
John, in answer to that, in terms of the commodities that we're interested in, precious metals is obviously the focus, but as we'd mentioned, we're open to other commodities. We're not an explorationist ourselves, but if there was a great deposit that was a rare earth deposit, we would certainly consider it. I wouldn't put rare earths at the top of the list in terms of things that we're likely to do, and that's not driven by the nature of the geology. More likely the things that you would see us invest in is what you've seen in the past, precious metals, oil and gas, copper, iron ore.
These are all things with highly liquid markets where it's very easy for us to understand those markets. I wouldn't rule rare earths out, but I'd say it's on the less likely category.
There are no further questions from the webcast.
Before we close the meeting, a reminder that we'll be releasing our Q1 results later today, and a press release should cross The Wire early this evening. We hope you'll be able to join us for our Q1 conference call, which is scheduled for 10:00 A.M. tomorrow morning.