Presenting this morning is Pan American Silver, Americas-focused gold and silver miner. Produced 20.9 million ounces of silver last year, 882,000 ounces of gold. Presenting we have Michael Steinmann. He's Director, President, and CEO. He's been 20 years with the business this year and has been CEO since 2016. He holds a Ph.D. in geology.
Yeah, thank you very much. Wow, that's bright. Good morning, everyone. It's always a pleasure to be here, back in my hometown. It doesn't happen too often, but thanks for the introduction. It's actually more than 20 years with Pan American, yeah. Unfortunately, I'm a little bit older than that. It's quite a few more years in the business. But has been a great run. Happy to give you an update on Pan American. A lot has happened since last time I've been here. Please keep in mind I will use forward-looking statement and just oh, it's this one, I guess. I will use forward-looking statements in my presentations. So as I said, lots has changed in a year in Pan American. And not only the metal prices.
That just happened in the last few months, as we know. But you see there on the map our set of assets. We're running now 11 mines across the Americas. We are really a South American-focused company. There's a really good reason for that, because that's where the silver is. Most of the silver projects in the world are in the Cordillera, with Mexico and Peru being the biggest silver producers, also for us the biggest silver producing countries. But you see there what's really important for us, you see the pie graph there, you see the diversification we have, of course. There's higher political risks in Latin America than in North America. So you have to be geographically diversified to take care of that risk. And that's what we're doing, being active in eight different countries.
We are the second largest primary silver producer in the world. But we also did a very large transaction. Just a year ago we closed the Yamana transaction, which brought us quite a bit more gold. It actually increased our silver production, or added about 56% more silver there, about 10 million ounces -11 million ounces. But it more than doubled our gold production as well, so. Last year it was only nine months with the Yamana assets. As I said, we just closed exactly a year ago at the end of Q1. So you should see a little bit more gold and a bit more of silver production this year, than last year. So we're guiding somewhere around 900,000-1 million ounces of gold, in the range of 21 million ounces -23 million ounces of silver. So very large, very strong production. A lot of exploration potential.
We're also holding not only the largest silver reserve in the world, but also the largest resource. So when you look at all the projects, some are just shy of 500 million ounces of silver in our reserves and about 1.3 billion ounces in our resource box. So a lot of silver there, lots of projects, and a lot to talk about, when we look at the different countries and different mines. Just a bit about last year. And I really like this kind of graph. I often show cash flow. I know when you look at costs mining companies, you see a lot of difference how people account for costs, what people include in cash costs or in all- in sustaining costs. So it's a little bit difficult sometimes to compare.
I think we tend to be on the conservative side. I like to have all the costs really included in our operational side. But at the end, look at cash flow statements, look at cash flows in the company. That tells you always the truth. At the end of the day, you spend the money in one way, one way or the other. If it's not in your cash cost included and in your projects, it will just be later on. So I like to show, and you see in every quarter this kind of graph, waterfall, for us. And you see there our cash positions in the gray bars. At the beginning of the year, I think it was $165 million. Then on the left side is really our operational side. So you see there very strong operational cash flow over $660 million.
As I said, that was only nine months of the Yamana assets. And then you see the big outflows, which are the three red ones. Of course, we have to spend sustaining capital. That's the first one. It's just what you have to do. You have to do development. You have to spend money on exploration. You have to replace your reserves. Of course, we pay taxes. Big numbers there as well. That's the next graph. And then the last one is the dividend. We paid over $130 million dividend last year. You may notice that I actually include the dividend on the operational side. There's a really good reason for that. I'm a strong believer that there should always be a return for our shareholders. Sometimes it's share appreciation, which, you know, gets stronger than anything else, which we see right now.
We went through a very big rerating here over the last few weeks. But there's also times where it's way harder when metal prices are depressed, like we saw in the last few years. And, at least then you should always, but especially then you should return dividend. Your, your business should be strong enough to do that. Last year we paid $130 million in dividend. This year it will be a bit more because it's the full year of the new share count. But that's really included in our kind of operational side. You see there our cash position would have increased to about $295 million. Then we go to the business development or future, if you want to call it, of the company on the right side. We sold actually quite a few assets last year after the transaction.
We sold the MARA project in Argentina to Glencore. We had 56% of that. We sold a project in Chile called Agua de la Falda to Rio Tinto. We sold a few assets in Peru and some little projects here and there. So over $660 million cash inflow from the sales. You see the big outflow is repaying off debt. We repaid nearly $400 million of debt last year. This is all our debt we had on us on the line of credit, so short-term debt. As you can imagine, interest rates were climbing for that. And then the rest is really just care and maintenance, exploration, development, and project development. And the biggest one there, the La Colorada Skarn project I will talk later on about, for sure, the biggest development project we have in the portfolio right now.
After all that, there are a lot of activity last year. We ended the year with a record cash holding of $441 million. So it was a strong year with very low metal prices, but very strong cash flow year for us, for sure. Just quickly the guidance for this year. I mentioned the production. You see there the cost guidance as well. Of course, there's a lot of points that can really influence that cost calculation. Just to mention a few, of course, metal prices. We don't show equivalencies. So we show gold and silver. We have gold mines that are in our gold segment and the silver mines in the silver segment. And any other metal that those mines produce, because you don't find silver on its own, it always comes either with gold or with base metals.
All those metals are used as a byproduct credit for our cost. So that's how our costs are structured. So if these byproduct credit metal prices go up, our costs are coming down for that metal. Otherwise, the other way is the same. If the costs go down, or the metal prices go down, our costs are going up. Other points really important on the cost side, of course, energy costs always very important in the mining industry right now. I think the oil price is in a pretty comfortable place for us. But for the whole industry, if you see oil going above $100 again, that will have for sure an impact on the costs. And the last one, and don't underestimate that, is exchange rates as we are working in that many countries. And there's a lot of costs that we have in local currencies.
As an example, Mexico with a really, really strong peso right now, of course, that works against us. At the same time, we have two operations in Canada with a very weak Canadian dollar that helps us on the costs. Just to give you examples, what is included is not just costs that we have control over at the mine, but there's also a lot of factors that come from outside that move those costs. Just a few things on the strategy. And apologies, that's quite small. Of course, the presentation is on our website. But it's really the same, always kind of the same idea behind here what we do. We try to keep growing the company. It's a large company now, but we try to keep growing, but we try to improve quality at the same time.
So, increase the quality of our assets, stronger, longer-term production, better cash flows, better returns to our shareholders. Not only in dividend, we start the share buyback program, especially when we had this really depressed share prices. I will be very opportunistic with that. I think you have to look at the share buyback like any other acquisition. It should be accretive. So you be or should be very opportunistic when you have that chance to buy back your stock at an undervalued number. And that's, that's, that's what we did. And you look at new opportunities. And that's what we continuously do. We do that internally on our large land holdings. We have several million hectares of exploration ground that we explore. And on one of our mines, La Colorada, we made a world-class discovery. So that doesn't happen very often, unfortunately, but it does happen.
That's very exciting. But we're also looking around in the market and see what there is. We make investments in early-stage exploration companies. For example, we own nearly 12% of New Pacific in Bolivia with two large discoveries on the silver side there. Or we wait until the discovery is done, and then we purchased the company that found it, and we're building the mine because that's what we do. We are mine builders and operators. Very strong financial position. And that's really, really important, should be for anybody in this industry. You have to be very careful on the debt side, in the mining industry. As we all know, we can see large variability on the metal price. And when you get caught with too much debt, that's been a lot of problems in many companies that I've seen in my career.
As I said, we repaid all our short-term debt, so there's no high-interest-bearing debt. You see there we have two bonds that came to us from the Yamana transaction. You know, that's quite nice to have. I know in Switzerland that's probably quite normal when you see long-term interest rates around 2.6%, but definitely not in North America. So that's a weird exception. And there's a bond at $500 million at 2.6%, which matures in 2031. So if you have long-term debt, that's really the debt you want to have at this point. And, you know, we'll see how interest rates behave here down the road. But that's all the debt we have. As I said, record holdings in cash at the end of the year, and our line of credit is fully available to us.
So, but $1.2 billion of liquidity available to us to react to opportunities in the market, which I have no doubt, no doubt they will, they will come. So when you do a transaction like the last large Yamana transaction, of course you do it for the, for the assets. That's number one. You try to find high-quality assets. And in that case, for sure, Jacobina in Brazil was, you know, the crown jewel of it. But there's other reasons to do it, not the only one, but a strong one in this case are synergies and other cost savings. And they're quite sizable numbers if you look at the graph there on the synergy side. On the left side, just the G&A, $61 million a year.
That's occurring every year, occurring synergies that we can harvest just on the G&A side, combining the two companies, having a, you know, a smaller overhead, moving it together into one office. And that happens in several countries as we had overlap in several countries. So $61 million savings. But you see on the, on the right side there, additional savings of $90 million. And that really came from selling the assets, the big, the biggest part. The MARA asset, as I mentioned, that we sold to Glencore is a development project. But it had a very large care and maintenance component. So we were owning, we owned 56%. The rest was with Glencore. Care and maintenance cost was about $100 million a year. So $56 million for Pan Am. We had a mine in Peru, Morococha that we sold.
There was another $14 million care and maintenance, so $70 million together. Then, as I mentioned, we paid back our line of credit, so $20 million -$25 million savings on interest payments. So another $90 million savings on top of the synergies we had by selling assets within the first three months of closing off the transactions. So quite, quite, quite quick. It was a good market to do that. And we sold everything for cash and royalties. So beside the cash that you see that we're holding there, we're holding now gold and copper royalties with very strong counterparts, Glencore, Rio Tinto, etc., which I think are probably in the range of about $150 million right now. Of course, we don't sell them yet. I probably like many in here in this room believe in a very strong bull market here to come.
So we'll wait selling those royalties. But, having a royalty, you know, it's very easy to convert that royalty into cash if you want to at the right time. Until then, we'll just hold them and sit on it and hopefully create more by divesting a few more assets this year and going forward. If we talk La Colorada, for sure we have to talk about what happened over the last two years. We were quite suffering. And I'm sure you, when you look at our results, we missed guidance for the last two years. And the main reason for that was really La Colorada, the upper part, the veins that we're mining up there. And we had big problems on the ventilation side. We had two raises that did not work anymore.
The ground was so difficult that at the end, the only solution to it was to actually sink a blind shaft, 5.5 m diameter. You see a picture there in construction on the right side. That's obviously like the last resort you do. That was a $48 million project just for ventilation. That's really what you do when nothing else works, from raise bores to grouted raise bores, etc. You built that. It's now finished. We're just putting, you see there a picture how it's going to look at the end. That's two fans that go on top each. It's 2,000 horsepower that we are installing now. So by mid-year, everything should be finished and we should be back at normal production at La Colorada finally.
That was really the main reason why we were suffering on the production side and on the cost side, because you can imagine as we show cost per ounce, if your denominator gets reduced that much, your cost just gets sky high very quickly. But they will come down very quickly as well when we are back at full production. But let's talk a little bit about that gigantic discovery that we made at the Skarn project. That's how we call it. And look, maybe I just go quickly forward to explain it to you. And I'm not sure that the laser works. But you see this is a cross-section through the hill. You see green on top. You see the surface. You see in gray our underground levels at the mine. So that's La Colorada mine.
We're mining veins, high-grade material, 1.50 m, 2 m wide. Then you see beyond, below there, the discovery made three large ore bodies, nearly 300 million tons. So you compare the few m of structures that we're mining right now to the best intercept, which was nearly 400 m in that skarn body. It will be, once it's in production, a very large silver deposit, but it will also be the largest zinc mine in the world because it's a base metal deposit with a very, very long life. You see in blue all the development it needs. There's a lot of development. It's deep. It should produce about 17 million ounces of silver a year. It will also produce about 425,000 tons of zinc and over 250,000 tons of lead. So it will be a very, very large project.
Capital number is about $2.8 billion. I made very clear from the beginning on that we're not doing that on our own. I'm interested in the silver, absolutely. I will find somebody to finance a large part of this project for the zinc and the lead production in this mine. Just to give you an idea, the zinc market does not, many people probably are more focused on precious metals, but you see the two largest zinc producing mines right now there, they actually pretty soon come to an end or reduce their production over the next six-seven years. At that point, La Colorada will be the largest zinc mine in the world, bar none. If there's another big discovery, but at the moment, I don't, I don't think so.
But it's not only the largest production, but you will see it's also one of the lowest production costs in the world. So very nice combination as a project. And there's no way to create more value than finding a deposit on your own land below your already producing mine because it's not only that what makes it easier, but it's the permitting process that makes it easier as well. So very nice, very big, very large project. I think very little involved that is this project at the moment in our share price just because it's early. I've traveled the world really lately. I get a lot of interest from people to take on that base metal component of La Colorada. So hopefully, during this year or late this year, we have some more clarity on the structure.
And I think once we have that value, it will come in our share price from that very large project. Of course, everybody has the question on Escobal. You see there the operation, how small the footprint is for the biggest already built silver mine that since we bought it, and we bought it in care and maintenance, it's still in care and maintenance. I think we made big strides, really moved forward very nicely over the last couple of years after COVID. The government changed in Guatemala on the 14th of January. I think that set us a little bit back on timing here. So it slowed right a bit down. As is normal, I don't give it timing. It's not in my control. But you see there, Escobal has produced, while it was active, 20 million ounces -21 million ounces at very low cost.
Just that by itself can double our silver output when it's back in operation. As I said quickly, Jacobina, a great gold mine for us. We're doing a lot of studies this year to see how much more we can increase the production after we already reached the record production last year of 196,000 ounces. There are a few slides on the silver market. I just want to show two because we're running out of time. There is a real deficit on the silver market now already for three years. It will continue. It's very difficult to see a big improvement on the producing side. It's extremely hard to find large silver operations. All the projects, or most of the really large ones, are in our hands.
And then we have, obviously, for obvious reasons, a very fast increase in demand as you need silver for electronics, for solar panels, for electric cars, you name it. And you need it also in your hospital because it has very strong antibacterial properties. So large increase on the demand side, no increase on the producing side, created that very large deficit. But when you look at the graphs and the forecast, you see there the growth in blue for solar panels, in orange for cars. And just to remind you that an electric car needs two to three times more silver than a combustion engine just because it's in the electronic components. And the more TVs, sorry, the more screens, the more computers you have in a car, the more silver you need.
So there's a very strong case, obviously, for silver in the future, in the near future, while we don't see more production coming on. So great position to be in. You can see ESG. We talked a bit about it, obviously. And that's not just the last thought here. It's actually the first thought. We have, we report on ESG and publish our report since 2010. So we did that way before anybody asked us to do it. And please feel free to download the news report on our website. There's a lot of information there and a lot of things that we do and always have done to be successful in some of the more complicated jurisdictions in the world. Okay, and with this, I leave it. We have some updated numbers there on the size of the company. It's changing by the day.
Obviously, right now, there is a lot of rerating happening. Strong company, strong projects, focused on cash flow, focusing on improving even further the quality of the assets and harvesting this bull market's coming and harvesting this big increase in silver demand in the world, which I have no doubt will continue for a long time to come. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. We run over, so we don't have time for questions.