Just by sort of introducing Triple Flag and sort of what makes it unique in the gold royalty space?
Yeah, thanks. This month it's eight years since I started the company. I was Barrick's CFO, left at the time with capital out of New York from Elliott, who were intrigued by the streaming and royalty business model as a way to invest in precious metals. The challenge very often, and I've been in mining for 30-odd years, mostly companies like BHP Billiton, Xstrata, and then Barrick, is capital allocation and execution. And this model is one that offers a level of diversification, optionality, which is very hard to replicate in an operating business, candidly. So we set out to invest about $1 billion as a private company, and if we could successfully execute, which we did, the idea then was to IPO, which we did three years ago.
Our focus was to unapologetically be focused on precious metals and to compete directly with what we see as the more rational end of the streaming and royalty model space, which is the big end. So the three premier competitors: Royal Gold, Wheaton, and Franco-Nevada. Barriers to entry are higher. You require more capability. The checks are larger. And the opportunity set there to make meaningful impacts to the mining sector is higher. So that's what we set out to do eight years ago. It was me. No assets. No business cards. We've accumulated an incredible team. We now have 234 assets. 32 are producing. Those have generated the highest growth rate in the sector since inception. So we've had a 20% cumulative annual growth rate, 90% cash margins.
We have a trailing cash run rate, and bear in mind, this is before we've seen these recent record prices, of about $40 million of cash flow a quarter. My dividend consumes just over $40 million, and we have about $40 million of net debt. So we have at the moment just under $700 million available to deploy. We also have the highest insider ownership in the space. I'm a top seven shareholder. My CFO is top 20. We are owners of this company. I have about 45 times my base salary tied up in equity of the company. Not synthetic. Actual equity I own. And so that really drives a lot of how we think as owners and as value creators in the space. We're 75% gold, 20% silver. The rest is really a bit of copper and nickel.
In terms of differentiation, I spent most of my career (I've lived in five countries, and I've worked all over the place) a lot of our deal flow is bilateral. It's come whereby we're streaming, say, gold and silver, like in Northparkes, on a copper mine in Australia. A lot of our deal flow has been through putting ideas as former executives in big mining companies where you're competing for really with debt and equity and to try and provide them with alternatives to some of the funding challenges perhaps they have to grow or expand or indeed unlock value for their investors. And so that's led us to this high growth rate, a strong balance sheet. We've grown our dividend year on year, 5% since inception, which we've seen some of the best in the space do.
I think we're seeing probably the busiest pipeline we've seen since we started the company at the moment.
So just in terms of a sort of current state of things, you reported results yesterday, I believe, and achieved record gold equivalent ounces. Can you maybe talk a little bit about that and the current state of the company?
Yeah. So we just released our quarterly GEO ounce numbers yesterday. So we were just under 20,000 ounces, which is a new record for us. I think what it really demonstrates is the power of the portfolio. So we've had seven annual successive records to generate that 20% cumulative annual growth rate. This year, I think we're the only company amongst the intermediates and the seniors to actually offer guidance that was increased. We're doing 105,000-115,000 ounces this year. You can think of that as 26% or so above our intermediate peers. And I think what it demonstrates is just the power of the portfolio. When you've got most of our growth coming from those 32 producing assets and you've got over 200 assets in the non-producing category, nobody's paying attention to those.
Part of the reason for our record this quarter was nobody was focusing on the Kensington royalty that we just settled with Coeur. So we got nearly 3,000 ounces that came in. You have to imagine that in a portfolio with that many where we don't have to commit any more capital for that, over time, some subset of those will deliver meaningful value to our investors and create the catalyst for potential outperformance.
Right. Okay. So looking forward, as you mentioned, you have exposure to an impressive list of companies and assets. But one of your cornerstone assets, Northparkes, recently had a change of ownership. Can you talk a little bit about how you partner with operators and how you transition that relationship in the event of ownership changes? And more specifically to Northparkes, what opportunities might arise as a result of Evolution now being the operator of that asset?
Yeah. I think the first thing is this is a repeated game. Ultimately, we're providing capital to a sector that is a long-run capital deployment business. And so you have to be a good part of that ecosystem. And so what that means for us is not only offering competitive funding, but where we can help the operators, social license to operate, to improve, we do that. So we do hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in scholarship programs, community support initiatives, and that. With that, we make sure that their social license and due diligence when we do these deals is impeccable because if there are problems with tailings and other issues, a higher return is not going to fix that. And we've also maintained carbon neutrality as we've gone since inception. We track through Scope 3, and we do that.
In the case of where the need is, it's not the majors who they've got great balance sheets. The equity capital markets and debt markets increasingly do not serve intermediates and single asset producers particularly well. I think that's a secular trend that has been ongoing for a very long period of time now. That creates opportunity, particularly for competitive, thoughtful capital as part of the capital stack. What we find, therefore, is a lot of the businesses that we've invested in have become very attractive acquisition targets over time. And so when they successfully execute because we provide risk capital, essentially, they end up getting acquired. Northparkes, I'll touch on in a second. We've had Continental, which was Continental Gold, which was taken out. We've seen Anglo American Platinum being bought by Implats. Karora with Beta Hunt, where we have a royalty, has just been bought.
It was announced today, in fact, or yesterday. So I think that's a common feature that the portfolio evolution will continue. In Northparkes, for those of you less familiar, copper mine, more than 500 million tons of resource at reserve grade being mined at about 7.6 million tons per annum with gold and silver as a byproduct. And we stream gold and silver. At the time, we wrote a $550 million check. It's a mine that's been operating for 35 years. It has decades of mine life. The operators on the ground talk about this going on for 100 years. And the manifestation of those half a billion ounces or sorry, 500 million tons is really on 26 square kilometer footprint. And the stream is exposed to more than 1,000 square kilometers.
It was previously operated by originally North and Rio Tinto, who drilled it extensively down to 200 meters looking for shallow open pits. But this has shallow open pits. It's multi-ore source with lots of cigar-like porphyries. This was the first operation to do block caving in Australia. It was also the first fully automated underground mine in the world. China Moly owned it for 10 years. They were great operators of that. But they don't have good disclosure requirements from our perspective. With Evolution acquiring that now, we've got a great track record in Australia. When I was Barrick's CFO in 2015, they acquired Cowal. It's just down the road by Australian terms from Northparkes. They've added 340% to reserves. They've been very astute on how they've operated that.
They have great block caving and sublevel caving capability from their ownership of Ernest Henry. We're really looking forward to seeing what they can do with that asset. We've just seen this quarter alone a 90% increase in ounces compared to the last quarter as they enter a higher grade gold zone.
Okay. You talked a little bit about your pipeline. And we've heard from other royalty companies that obviously, I think it's become sort of a critical element of the financing strategy for a lot of development stage companies in order to advance projects. Can you just talk a little bit about the state of your pipeline as it stands now and sort of what attributes you look for in projects that you're looking to invest in?
Yeah. So you'd like to stack the odds in your favor. And I think the stats for the sector prior to COVID and some of the supply chain disruption showed that only one in five mines typically come in on time and on budget. And some of them spectacularly blow out. So if you're going to build a portfolio with those odds, that's not great, right? For us, what that meant strategically was committing the bulk of our capital in producing assets with good life extension potential and good optionality. So you'll see our first asset was Cerro Lindo. We've already recouped that capital. And they've extended mine life where we stream silver. It's a copper lead zinc mine beyond what we underwrote at the time. It's already beyond the visible life of what we underwrote.
Northparkes is a good example where in the year 2000, as a copper mine, they had 1 million ounces of gold in reserve. They took out in the next 20 years 1.1 million ounces of gold, and they've got just under 1 million ounces of gold in reserve. It's that sort of lovely cadence of reserve replacement. So we tend to put a lot more of our capital. And a lot of our growth that we're projecting up to 140,000 ounce average over the next five years is really from those sorts of assets that are entering into higher gold grade zones or they're ramping up, which lowers risk. And then you've got the we've sized some of our so normally, those checks we try and write for bigger deals are in $1-$500 million type categories. The biggest that we've done was $550 million.
We've done a number of growth assets, but there's only so many assets where we don't normally take on permitting risk. We want to be the last money in and fund them into production because I'm not interested in funding to a milestone. We want to get to cash flow. We want to help those operators. There, we're working with debt and equity providers typically to provide that capital. That's been our focus. We're building a portfolio. We want something that'll generate good cash flow to reinvest and continue to generate growth. I think that's what our track record shows.
Okay. So you mentioned, I think, 110,000 gold equivalent ounces. They're about expected this year. I think you've outlined a path to around 140 sort of over the next five years or so. If you were to look ahead, where do you see the company in five years' time in terms of?
Look, I think the first thing to recognize is if you go five years back, we were doing a little over 30,000 ounces a year. So we've built this company really not through other people's assets that we were gifted. We've done it through transactions as shareholders. And so when I look to that future, firstly, the 140+ thousand ounces there, I don't have to commit capital there. That's money that's already sunk. You'll see that our cash yield on net invested capital and our returns compare with the best in the sector. I think they look very favorable. But we are not incentivized through our scorecards or otherwise to commit capital and do deals for the sake of it. We're here to create value.
So when I look to that future, if history is any predictor and you asked the question earlier, I haven't fully answered it because I think the pipeline in this minute is the best that I've seen in our eight years. I think that is a function of, on the one hand, we've got great gold prices, good silver prices. But a lot of the underlying polymetallic primary commodity prices, whether it's certainly not copper maybe, but nickel, PGMs, and others, are not at record highs. A lot of those companies require balance sheet enhancement or liquidity improvements. And we're seeing some really interesting deal flow opportunities, I think, for the sector. And I think there's a lot more to come in the future. There's a lot more growth that's being projected in energy metals and elsewhere.
I don't believe that's going to come at the moment through the equity capital markets. They're not super supportive. Equity is expensive. The diversifieds and the majors are continuing to be, I think, very disciplined. I don't believe a lot of the growth is going to come out of those companies. I think it's going to be those who can access capital and it can execute who will deliver this. They'll be acquired by larger businesses. That's an opportunity.
So when you talk about other metals that aren't at record highs, is there, I mean, you're predominantly precious metals focused. But is there sort of a limit or is there a willingness to invest in certain metals? Is there a threshold that you would sort of invest up to?
I'd say a rule of thumb. Look, we're a high-growth company where we deliver ounces at the scale that we're at. For the foreseeable future, we can continue to generate strong growth. Most of my career has actually been in diversified mining companies, in bulks and base metals, for example. So a lot of our deal flow comes through those channels. The best way I can support a copper mine, for example, into growth or through acquisition is streaming a byproduct that the miner doesn't care about. I'm not competing for primary. I'm offering them a competitive cost of funding. And I'm also offering my investors more precious metals exposure. But we have copper and nickel. We've looked at lithiums and cobalts and every flavor. We've seen nearly 1,000 opportunities for the deals that we've done so far. I think the key is just being very disciplined in doing so.
We've seen wild price movements in some of these. In theory, we could go perhaps the 20% or so in some of those other categories. Of course, we could even go slightly overweight if we then continued as we have been growing with precious. I think there's a lot of scope to invest more capital, not just in precious, but indeed beyond.
Okay. We have some time for some questions from the audience if there's anybody in the audience that has a question. There's one at the back of the room.
Do you expect to return larger amounts to your shareholders in the near future or do you just believe in growth?
Look, the way I viewed it as a shareholder myself, I own 2.5 million shares in this company. This matters. And so we built this company through investing capital astutely. There have been points where we've looked at our share price, and we have bought back shares. So we do $40-odd million a year in ordinary dividends. We bought back over $20 million of shares last year. And liquidity is a constraint for us as we continue to grow here. We've got index inclusion when we acquired Maverix last year and boosted our liquidity. I think there's a lot more opportunity. But to your point, capital allocation choices here really are purely focused on a per-share basis. How do we make this company better?
We'll continue to do that, whether it's buying back shares at the right time or we saw the sector, for example, the last couple of years invest $ billions where we've typically deployed $ a few hundred million a year. We sat back because we saw fewer opportunities in the things that we've typically grown this company through because we had to try and create value over the longer term. We'll continue to maintain that discipline.
Any other questions? Maybe I could just ask so Elliott is obviously still a large shareholder. They're happy to maintain their shareholding. There's no risk of sort of sales or into the market.
Yeah. Elliott was an important feature for my decision to start this company because I think if you're looking to deploy meaningful capital with a good capital partner, you don't want a group who's going to have a very short-term horizon and try and gain the cycle because I think that's a fool's errand. Elliott, when I got together with them in 2016, had $29 billion AUM. They're now $65 billion AUM. They have a single pool of capital with an evergreen time horizon. They've held some investments for over 30 years. I know when we IPOed, we had a lot of people speculating that this was an exit event for them. But they like gold precious. They like this company. And so they've been very, very supportive. They've only actually continued to increase their position since we've IPOed rather than the opposite when blocks have come available.
So I think there are a potential source in the future of sensible secondary to boost liquidity. We are able to walk and chew gum. So like we saw with Maverix, if there's a sensible accretive transaction that adds to the portfolio or indeed if we're a potential acquisition target, that's great. If it adds value, that's what we will do. But those are ways to, I think, continue to unlock value. We've seen some delays in some of the reporting of things like Newmont's block trade. And I think once you start looking at current trading in that, there's potential for composite index inclusion and others in the future for us. All of that helps.
Excellent. Any other questions? If not, Shaun, thank you very much for taking the time today.
You do, thanks. Appreciate it.