We're so thrilled this afternoon to host our friend James Dendle, the Chief Operating Officer of Triple Flag Precious Metals, which in less than a decade has assembled a spectacular portfolio. James, tell us all about the progress, please.
Sure. Thanks, John. Nice to see you again, and thanks to all of those who are joining us today. I'll run through the presentation on screen, direct people towards the normal cautionary statements to read at their leisure. I'll just provide a brief overview. Obviously, the market cap is a moving target, but essentially, Triple Flag was founded in 2016, and today we're, depending on the metric used, the fourth largest streaming and royalty company in the precious metals space. When we founded the company, there was a clean sheet of paper. There were no people, there was no name, there were no assets. The team running this business has assembled the entire portfolio of assets that you see today, and much of the team has been with the company since the earliest days. Looking at 2025, sales guidance is 105,000- 115,000 gold-equivalent ounces.
We see that rising to 135,000- 145,000 gold-equivalent ounces in 2029, and I'll touch on the drivers of that growth later on. The important thing to note now, though, is that it's growth from existing assets in the portfolio today and does not include contributions from future acquisitions. That comprises 237 assets in the portfolio, of which 30 are producing and the rest are in various states of exploration and development. We pay a dividend, which equates to $0.23 a share. We've moved that dividend up every year since the IPO in May of 2021, and today we have about $1 billion of available liquidity to find new situations.
I know many on the call will be familiar with the streaming and royalty business, and I'm sure that people who have been invested in such businesses for a long time, but I will just take a moment to describe what we see as the key strengths of this business, particularly in relation to more traditional gold mining stocks and companies. Essentially, streaming and royalty companies are designed to generate very robust free cash flows. There's no drag on the free cash flow from ongoing capital expenditures. I'll wrap all this up later into what I see as really important to consider when investing in this sector. Streaming and royalty businesses are typically diverse. We operate much larger portfolios than the comparably sized gold mining company.
As an operator, it's not feasible to operate 30 different assets at this scale, whereas a streaming and royalty company, because our interests are run by other companies insofar as the streams and royalties, we're interested in the revenue, essentially. We have the productive utility of tens of thousands of people working at mines all over the world, all to generate the revenues in this business while having a headcount in our corporate office of 18 people. You can only really do that in the streaming and royalty business. We think that diversification is a strength, and we'll touch on that in a bit more detail later. On the diversification, when we use that word, we're talking about diversification of operator, the diversification of commodities to the extent that we're splitting gold and silver and some other metals, and also diversification of jurisdiction.
The nature of the business model allows a much more diversified jurisdictional spread than you could feasibly achieve with an operating company. One of the key drivers of value in this business over the long term is the optionality. There's deeply embedded optionality in these instruments to price. As prices go up, we benefit, and all that benefit falls to the bottom line. It's not a question of margin expansion, margin contraction that you see typically with mining companies. We have the margins built into each contract, so improvements to gold price flow directly to our free cash flows. New discoveries, of course, replacement expansions all accrue to us, and we've actually got a number of discoveries and instances of really strong reserve replacement and expansions to operations that are benefiting us today and will continue to benefit us in the future. That optionality, I think, is very powerful.
When we look at this business, overall, you're essentially investing in gold exposure that, unlike bullion, actually provides a yield. That yield is serviced very easily by the cash flow the portfolio generates. Over time, you're getting a free call on tremendous exploration expenditures, capital expenditures, and a lot of embedded optionality in terms of land area, which I think is a characteristic that's quite hard to see from just looking at these businesses on a high level. I've already touched on it, but the consistency of margins is crucial. Our margins are fixed by contract, so we're not exposed to inflation. Our margins don't expand or contract; they're fixed. On the G&A side, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, there's a very small number of people running this business.
The majority of the team here is focused on reinvesting the cash flows into accretive and valuable opportunities and continuing to build the business. It's a very low overhead and very scalable business. For instance, we could double the size of the net asset value through adding new assets without meaningfully or in any way changing the headcount of this company. We think we provide a lot of upside, low risk, and high diversification, which I think, you know, history has shown this to be a very strong and durable business model. John and I, just before this presentation, were talking about the gold price, and it would be difficult to pass this page. To state the obvious, this page is already out of date as gold prices are cresting almost $4,000 per ounce. We feel our role is to provide investors with exposure to gold and silver, principally.
We obviously don't control the gold and silver price, and we also don't speculate on the gold and silver price, but we believe that by investing at good returns into high-quality assets that have lots of embedded optionality over time, the value will be created through making those investments and participating in gold price. When we stand back, we look at the gold price, and we can create a far more cogent set of arguments for a higher gold price in the longer term than we can for a lower gold price in the short to medium or even long term. We think structurally, gold is a very good place to be, and there's been no better example of that than performance in 2025. Fundamentally, we've seen the thesis demonstrate itself this year.
Governments can continue to print money, but they really can't print gold, and the debt burden in particular is one that we think is structurally very supportive to the commodity. I'll just spend a few moments talking about the history of the company, the track record, and some of the drivers of growth. As I mentioned in the beginning, this company was founded in 2016. Our founder, along with a New York-based investment manager called Elliott Management, who some may be familiar with, saw it as an opportunity to provide a form of finance to the mining sector that was generally underserved by conventional forms of finance while generating good returns for shareholders at a time where gold seemed to be structurally mispriced. The business was founded in 2016. Our first asset transaction was in late 2016, which delivered revenue in 2017.
The revenue here is expressed in gold-equivalent ounces, so you can see our gold-equivalent ounce growth from 33,000 oz in 2017 through to 113,000 oz in 2024. That's all been generated as a consequence of the transactions that our team has made. Currently, as I started off by saying, we're at 105,000- 115,000 gold-equivalent ounces for 2025, and that's set to grow. Above and beyond the 2029 growth outlook are a number of exploration development properties that we think will, more likely than not, add meaningfully beyond the 135,000- 145,000 over time. Generally, what you'll see is, as we get more confidence in the timeline to deliver some of those projects, we start incorporating those into our outlook. One example of that would be Hope Bay.
Over the last couple of years, the timing and the nature of that mine has become much more clear, and we've now incorporated it into our 2029 outlook. That's a number that continually gets reevaluated and refreshed, but it always moves in the right direction, which is to be a high figure. I touched on certain elements of this slide at the beginning of the presentation, and one of the key themes to highlight here is that operating cash flow and free cash flow are essentially the same number. This business model is very effective at translating revenue into free cash flow. We just don't have the drag of ongoing capital expenditures. Similarly, you can see the net earnings and adjusted EBITDA in the center. On the right, this really just shows the point I was making earlier.
The margins are fixed, so we're not subject to the variability in margins that a typical operating company would experience. The key to this business is really capital allocation. The reason there are employees here beyond just accounting is to deploy into new investments, and that's been the DNA of the company since day one. Since 2016, we've deployed $2.8 billion, and we really feel that looking back at the record today is a really important measure to gauge performance. That broadly correlates to about $280 million of annual capital deployment. In our role, we don't need to deploy into every opportunity we see. We need to deploy into very specific opportunities that meet our criteria and meaningfully drive value and that we can be confident we'll meet the criteria we're looking for. I'll talk a bit more about those criteria later when they're important.
With that $2.8 billion invested, we've received about $1.3 billion in asset free cash flows from the inception of the business through to the end of Q2 in 2025. With that, we have about $3.3 billion–3.4 billion of street analysts and NAV outstanding. That just gives you a very broad brush picture of how value's being created in this business and what that looks like today as a consequence of all the activity from 2016 through to the present day. Just looking at some of the specifics of that page on an asset level, I'll use Northparkes just to orientate people to this slide. The gray bar shows the dollar amount invested into a specific asset at the time of investment.
The darker sort of buff-colored bar shows the cash flow received from inception to the end of Q2 2025, and the lighter color bar shows the analyst NAV or the go-forward mine life that the research analysts in the market are modeling. If we take Northparkes as an example, and I'll touch on Northparkes in more detail later because it is our largest asset, we invested in 2020 $550 million. Today, we've received $193 million, and there's $850 million of NAV ahead of us. Now, there's a beautiful characteristic to some of these mines where you invest in a mine life upfront. You receive cash flows from day one, but over time, the ongoing drilling and exploration efforts, conversion resource definition efforts of that mining company tend to move mine life out. That's where you create a lot of value in this business.
Mine life moving out, getting a free, essentially a free carry on the exploration and the optionality embedded in those assets. We've seen that across a number of assets. Northparkes, just for context, is a half a billion-ton resource that mills at about 7.6 million tons per annum. There are many, many decades of life ahead. By simply moving out the mine plan, you capture the value of those future tons as a life of mine progresses. We've got similar stories in Boracay, which is a gold mine operated by Zhejiang in Colombia. We've recovered more than our investors at cash there after having made the investment in 2019 and have a huge amount of value ahead of us. I think in that asset in particular, it's very much underappreciated because there is a tremendous amount of exploration potential beyond the reserve there.
Similar with Young-Davidson, one of Alamos' lodestone assets located in Canada, a royalty acquired in 2018. I won't go through each of them, but Cerro Lindo has been a very important asset to us. We acquired that silver stream in 2016. It was our first investment. We invested $250 million. We've since received $353 million back. When we made the investment, the life of mine plan that we had at the time showed production declining to an eventual close of the mine in around 2024 or 2025. We're already well past the life of mine that was expected at the time of the transaction by the operator, and now we're into the period of significant excess returns. We expect that'll have a life well into the 2030s. There is a step down in that stream that will come into next year.
The stream rate steps down slightly, but we participate in the tail of that asset. It's been a very successful asset, and it gives you that really interesting window into how powerful buying a life of mine with, say, eight or nine years can be. Every year you add to that life of mine beyond what you pay for initially adds tens of millions of dollars of excess returns, putting aside an increase in commodity price. Just on the portfolio I spoke about at the beginning, diversification is crucial in most respects. If you look at the chart on the left, you can see the consensus net asset value shown by assets. The largest asset is Northparkes, but after Northparkes, many of the assets are sub-9%, sub-5%. We have a very diversified suite of assets, and Northparkes contributing 25% is probably the perfect asset to have as the largest contributor.
It's an established copper and gold mine with a very long track record, operated by Evolution , who's a wonderful custodian of the asset. It's located in Australia and has a very consistent record of production and tremendous optionality ahead of it. If you were to choose one asset as 25% of your business, I think having a high-quality asset in Australia is exactly where you want to be. I mentioned diversification being generally good. Where we are more concentrated, of course, is precious metals. By value, we're 91% precious metals, by which we mean gold and silver and nothing else. In the balance of the portfolio, the remaining 9%, we have some copper and some nickel. I'll talk a bit about copper and nickel and how we look at other commodities later, but suffice to say, precious metals is the focus of this company.
It always has been, it always will be, but we will make opportunistic investments in other commodities where we see good value. There are some others in there as well, lithium, for instance, we can touch on later. Geographically, our concentrations are skewed between Australia and North America, and then secondary in third place, Latin America, and some in the rest of the world. When we think about jurisdictions, we think about it tremendously, and we have always in this business been very selective about the jurisdictions we invest in, and we've tended to scale the investments to be right size for the jurisdictional risk. For instance, our largest investment was into Australia, where we've invested into countries like Mongolia or in West Africa. We've tended to invest smaller dollar values and also payback matters tremendously with jurisdictions.
With more challenging jurisdictions, we tend to look for smaller investments with shorter payback periods so you get your money back and enjoy the optionality before there's a chance for things to change. All of our longer-dated payback investments have been in much more established jurisdictions, so that gives you some perspective on what we're looking for, but it is crucial. Our preference and strong design is to try to tilt and continue to tilt the jurisdictional weighting of the company on a cash flow and NAV basis to be the more robust mining jurisdictions. I say mining jurisdictions deliberately. There are countries that are perfectly good locations to be investing or going on vacation to, but we really do prefer countries with an established mining business where mining does thrive and commodities thrive and meaningful part of the economy.
We think those are set up to provide a stable base of operations for mining companies for a long term, so that really is the focus on the jurisdictional side. It's reasonably well shown by this map, although it doesn't show the scale of the assets, but to my earlier point, Australia is the largest concentration. You'll see we have a large number of assets in North America. When you look at the 237, there's a disproportionate number of smaller assets that represent a very small portion of the capital deployed. For instance, we've invested over the years in royalty portfolios of royalties on the earlier stage of the exploration development cycle.
Where we do that, we look for small investments, high optionality into assets that have the potential to be something meaningful, and the large checks tend to be into the more established operations where we have a good understanding of what production will look like, and they're located in the right jurisdictions. You will also notice some regional clusters here. We have quite a number of royalties in Nevada where we've sort of consolidated some positions there, and the same in the Golden Triangle in BC, and other royalties scattered throughout Australia and Latin America. In terms of the producing assets, I've mentioned it already, but Northparkes, operated by Evolution , is a gold and silver stream on a copper mine located in New South Wales.
One of the reasons we like the gold and silver byproduct nature of the streams is the base metals mines quite often, not always, but quite often have a very long visible life of mine. The life of mine duration at Northparkes is well in excess of what one might expect for the typical gold mine. It gives you a very long, consistent period of gold and silver production. The same is true with Impala Bafokeng, which is operated by Impala Platinum in South Africa. It's a PGM mine that has a many decades-long PGM mine life, and the gold represents a very small part of the revenue. We'll be continuing to generate gold revenue and assets for decades to come. That byproduct nature of the streaming and royalty business, I think, is quite interesting and has been a focus for us over the years.
I touched on Cerro Lindo earlier. I won't go through each of these, but I will touch on some of the key ones. It's operated by Nexa Resources. It's located in Peru. It's a very stable, consistent operation. It's a zinc-led copper mine that produces itself a byproduct that we stream. It's been an absolute high point of our portfolio since day one. We invested in that asset. It's been generating cash flows for us ever since, and we've seen tremendous growth in the resource originated over time. Royalties include Fosterville, operated by Agnico, Young-Davidson, operated by Alamos , Beta Hunt, operated by Westgold, which is a very exciting asset in the portfolio. It's grown very, very quickly, both the resource and production. Camino Rojo, operated by Orla Mining.
We have a gold stream on La Colorada, which is a Pan American Silver asset, and a few others in the mix. We're very proud of the operating partners, and I think this speaks to one of the strengths of the model. When you look across the portfolio, it takes a huge amount of effort on behalf of the varying operating partners to produce the metals that drive our revenue. There are tens of thousands of people working across these businesses day and night, all of which produce revenues and develop projects, and ensure permits are kept in good standing, and all those sort of things. We effectively are the beneficiaries of a part of those activities without having to bear the cost of that labor and person burden. The growth profile is an important part of Triple Flag .
I mentioned earlier the growth up to the 135,000 oz- 145,000 oz in 2029. That is our outlook. That is based on assets that are in the portfolio today. The assets that comprise the growth from where we are now, which is 105,000- 115,000 up to that level, come in a few different forms. There's expansions of existing mines. Northparkes is a good example. Beta Hunt in Australia, Impala Bafokeng in ATO. We also have a series of exploration development projects. Hope Bay with Agnico. Montage Gold is building the Koné project. We have brownfield silver assets in Peru operated by Sierra Sun coming on. Tres Quebradas, which is a Zhejiang lithium asset, literally has started production in the last month. Those assets are all feeding into that buildup to 135,000- 145,000.
Now, of course, with $1 billion of liquidity and the history we have of deploying, say, $280 million a year, it is our expectation that we continue to grow the GEOs in an accretive manner well above and beyond that outlook through the deployment of capital into new streams and royalties. Northparkes I've spoken about a bit already, but I'll just touch on some specifics that I think are interesting and relevant. I mentioned the very long history of this mine, which started in the mid-1990s. It's well capitalized. It's operated by Evolution , who is a leading operator in Australia. Our stream covers 1,000 sq. km of tenement package, which is about 250,000 acres of land. Across that land, there are multiple targets for copper and gold mineralization. Northparkes is a very interesting mine.
It's a series of porphyry copper and gold deposits that are scattered amongst a 26 sq. km mining license. The mine operations span a number of those deposits, so you have multiple ore sources feeding a mill. One of the many things we think is interesting about Northparkes is the extent to which it's relatively underexplored. For an asset that's sitting in Australia that's been in production for so long, there are still discoveries being made on the mining license, not on the exploration license, but on the mining license, which is quite notable. You'll see in the center of this picture, on the right-hand side, outlines for Major Tom and E51. Those are deposits that have been discovered since we've acquired the stream that are new discoveries sitting on the license. We think that's quite unique.
Seldom do you find new mineral discoveries being made on mining licenses that have been active for, you know, 25 or 30 years. That's a pretty unique characteristic of Northparkes. That complements the half a billion tons of resource and reserves sitting at the mines. It's a target-rich, mineral-rich operation that's running at about 7.6 million tons of mill capacity per annum. Last year, for us, just to contextualize it, it produced 27,000 gold-equivalent ounces, which is mostly gold. One of the key catalysts of Northparkes is the establishment of the E22 cave, which is towards the left of this image, which has a relatively high reserve grade, about 0.37 g, 0.4 g of gold. The establishment of the E48 sub-level cave, which Evolution is working on at the moment, has reasonably good gold grades as well. That will drive and continue to drive gold production from Northparkes.
I touched on this earlier, but you can see in the regional side of things, this is in the same geographical area as Evolution's Cowal mine, and also Newmont's Cadia mine. It's a well-mineralized belt. It's well known. The majority of what's been done at Northparkes from an exploration perspective in the past has been on the mining license, which is shown on the right. Relatively small, 26 sq. km . That hosts the bulk of the half billion ton resource and reserve. On the left, you can see the regional position, the regional land position that we, our stream area is the area immediately surrounding Northparkes, which comprises just over 1,000 sq. km of very prospective gold-copper porphyry belt.
For reasons I can come on to later, there's very little drilling below 100 m, which really relates to the history of the company that was looking for gold near surface. That had been terribly focused on the copper at depth, and we continue to be the beneficiaries of that. 90-0 exploration oversight. Our most recent asset acquisition of note is the Arthur Project. Arthur is, in our opinion, the best royalty we've seen come available since we've started the business. It's a cornerstone asset for AngloGold Ashanti. The resource has grown rapidly every year. It's currently standing at 16 million ounces. We think this has potential to go well beyond the 16 million ounce level, well, well beyond the 16 million ounce level. It's being drilled and developed very aggressively by AngloGold Ashanti. It will be their most important asset in the 2030s.
There is a tremendous amount of exploration upside on the property. It's actually hard to give full credit to the amount of optionality embedded in the deposits of Merlin and Silicon and some of the other regional properties. We think this is one of the most exciting gold development projects around, and it's located in a very favorable part of Nevada. We think it's a readily achievable project, and we're thrilled to earn the 1% royalty on this asset. I touched on the history of the resource. It's grown remarkably from 3.4 million oz in 2021 to over 16 million now, and we think it will continue to grow at a pace. As I mentioned, our 1% NSR covers 74 sq. km . That's all of Merlin, all of Silicon. There are many drill rigs at the moment focusing on resource definition and extensions.
One of the pictures I like is shown here. You can see the resource area in that red color, and we're seeing drill holes outside the resource that are, for example, 236 meters at 1.3 grams a ton. Very strong, very strong gold intercept that is not part of the resource. I think there's tremendous potential to grow based on what we know today. Of course, further exploration and discovery in the future. It's a very straightforward ore type, oxide, heap leach, and milling. There's potential for sulfide mineralization at depth, which we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of. A tremendous amount of optionality. We like that it is an on-title, open-ended royalty. It's in the United States with an operator who's highly credentialed and can build the projects and take it through engineering, permitting, and construction.
We think it has the potential to really match up very well with some of the biggest gold districts in Nevada. It's really at its infancy. The rate of resource growth that Cortez and Goldstrike, which are different, slightly different deposits from a geological point of view, but their rate of growth from production through to the current day has been stunning. Arthur is pre-production. As the company brings its mines to production and continues to drill and explore, we think that the resource growth will continue for many, many years. In summary, our focus to boil it all down is about growing free cash flow per share. We're all big shareholders here. Many of the management team, our economic bread is buttered on the side of our investments in the shares of this company, more so than being paid annually.
We're very focused on growing the value of those shares. We think focusing on growing the free cash flow per share is crucial to drive compound growth. We look at all of our deals in that manner, and if it's not additive to the share value, we just don't do them. The business is diversified. We think the quality of the precious metals exposure is very, very strong. There's embedded growth from multiple assets within the portfolio by a number of top-tier assets like AngloGold Ashanti and Agnico. We have a very strong balance sheet, and again, our alignment with shareholders is reflected by the circa $115 million of insider ownership. The goal is simple.
It's to grow the dividends, reinvest, generate robust cash flows, and continue to look for assets that offer really good long-term precious metals exposure with a high degree of optionality, credible operators that we can all sleep well at night knowing are custodians of those assets. John, I'll stop there and turn it over to you for any questions that may have arisen.
Thank you, James, and thank you for everyone's attention on the webcast. You're all welcome to submit questions through the question box. James, sometimes royalty companies have a personality. EMX was founded by a geologist from Myanmar, and he gave money to some of his best colleagues and told them to just go explore. He didn't tell them what to explore for or where. They had things in Nevada, in Scandinavia, the Tethyan trend in Serbia, Turkey, and some of them were straight gold, some were copper gold, some were other things. It was successful because Dave's buddies were good. All the guests which preceded you were geology students in Newfoundland, and their summer job was to stake claims and sell them to juniors to pay their tuition. They had a royalty business model without having a company.
They just continued what was their summer job when they graduated in 1997 and it became Altius Minerals. Tell us a little bit about the cultural DNA. Shaun came from Barrick where he had been CFO and the network and friends and family and how the properties sort of assemble.
Yes, it's actually, John, it's a very good question and one that I think probably more people should ask, but few do. Yeah, thanks. It's a good one. EMX are great examples. You know, the DNA of this company is really more on coming out of larger mining companies. Our team for the most part has worked in larger mining companies and been involved with larger operations. I'd say it's twofold. We bring that perspective, but also one that reflects that of our shareholder, Elliott. Elliott's mindset is on value, on per share value, on never losing money, on protecting the downside. I think when you put those together, that really explains our approach. You make an interesting point on the exploration side.
The best exploration outcomes we've received in our portfolio today, the most meaningful, have not been necessarily from the exploration projects, but have been from the operating mines, right? I take Cerro Lindo. Cerro Lindo had a life of mine to 2025 when we bought that stream. Each year, they added life to that mine. We're getting another two or three million ounces of silver straight away, which has become very valuable. Those exploration results are real and tangible because the drills turn, they intersect mineralization, the company builds a resource model, they incorporate it into the life of mine plan, they do the designs, they mine it out and send us the checks over a very short, quick cycle. Our focus has always been on free cash flow as opposed to a more longer-term exploration optionality.
We've always looked for those free cash flow assets, so producing mines, where near-term, near-mine exploration can actually add value in quite a quick fashion. We've all seen examples of really interesting mining projects that sit on the shelf for 10, 20, 30 years. Frankly, for a royalty company, they're nice to own. You don't want to pay too much for them, but they're not creating value today when silver's $45- $50 an ounce and gold's $34,000. There is a lack of optionality that comes to those assets. The characteristics of the company have always been mining operators, mining company mindset first, combined with the, I guess, financial investment perspective that a company like Elliott brings.
The other piece that Shaun really led and Sheldon as the CEO has now continued, and we all try to embody, is we try to treat people in the way that we'd like to be treated. It's the stuff you tell your kids. We're fair, we're open, we're very transparent. I've been told this a few times, but our due diligence that we do on assets is extremely detailed, and we provide very frank feedback. We were at a mine earlier this year, and we actually identified some fundamental issues in their processing flow sheets on a project they were building. The engineering department literally went back to re-engineer those and send us up these data flow sheets. Our approach is sort of very, sometimes maybe too candid. Transparency, I think, has been valuable both with our counterparties we're dealing with and also internally.
I think that that's really shaped the culture of this organization, being agile, nimble, creative, but really seeing it in just sound operating judgment.
In terms of your 30,000-ounce step-up over the next four years in GEOs, which one or two items is the most significant addition?
Yeah, I'll just go back to the page. It's a bit of a combination. What's interesting is that there's no one asset that disproportionately impacts that step-up. Northparkes, the production of that mine goes up and down depending on the grade of the gold in the areas they're mining. Next year will be a bit lower, and then over the period to 2029, that will step up as they're into E48 and start accessing E22. Of the others, Beta Hunt is a fairly meaningful portion of that. There's another asset in here, Arcata and Azuca, which you may recall as a Hochschild mine from a few years ago. We've backed a team that's acquired that mine from Hochschild and is restarting that operation literally as we speak. That adds a reasonable amount to that total in that period of time.
We also have Koné with Montage Gold adding to the profile as well. Those are some of the slightly more material contributors.
Could you walk us through how much you paid to get the 1% in Arthur from Origin?
Yeah, that's a good question. On Origin, it was a deal where we acquired the entire Origin Royalties Company. We held back the Arthur royalty, and then we spun out the remaining business to Origin, and we kept about 10% of the shares through a private placement into Origin Royalties. It was a corporate deal which was done really for the benefit of Origin shareholders because it availed them of a tax-free rollover in Canada. Really, our objective was, of course, just getting the asset. We paid slightly less than $250 million for the 1% on Arthur when you sort of boil down the share consideration and the spin-out and that kind of thing. That's the price of the asset deal, which is more or less in line with, obviously, you'll be aware, Franco-Nevada bought a piece of that royalty.
Franco opened at $275, so you did 10% better.
Frankly, it doesn't matter that they're both great deals. It's a wonderful asset. Clobberage is slightly different. We have a bit more of the known deposits. They have a bit more of the exploration potential in one area. I think both assets are fantastic and will be great for our shareholders and great for Franklin's shareholders.
Is that your only acquisition this year?
We closed two others this year. We closed an acquisition of a Tres Quebradas royalty. We bought a 0.5% royalty on, we call it 3Q, which is Zhejiang's flagship lithium mine in Argentina, which they've been building. As you know, lithium is not our core focus, but we identified the assets as being amongst the highest quality assets out there in the lithium space at a time when no one frankly cared about the lithium business. Prices had taken a huge reduction from the peaks they reached a year or two ago. We felt there was a mispriced opportunity to acquire the lithium exposure. When we go into those sort of non-gold and silver assets, we really are looking for the absolute highest quality, very, very big resource with expansion potential.
There is a very clear line of sight with Zhejiang to double and potentially even triple the capacity coming out of 3Q. We managed to pick it up at a pretty attractive price.
How much have you paid?
We've paid just under $30 million U.S. The mine started production recently. Importantly, it's an Argentinian mine, but the operator pays us internationally in U.S. dollars. It's a wonderful royalty. The other deal we closed was the one that I mentioned a few moments ago, which is the silver stream on Arcata and Azuca, which is the Sierra Sun operated asset in Peru. We acquired it out of Hochschild. That mine will do 7.5 to 8.5, 9 million oz of silver a year for the operator. We have a 5% stream on that asset. It's produced over 300 million ounces of silver historically and has a very large and highly prospective land package. We're excited about that opportunity.
How much was that?
That was $35 million.
You're definitely better than your track record of 280 a year, and you've got your work done this year already.
We don't think of it that way. Yeah, we don't think of it that way at all. I mentioned in the presentation, we look for what we think are the best opportunities, and there are years where we'll do more, years where we'll do less. This year we've done one big, very high-quality development asset. We've done a lithium construction commissioning stage asset, which is smaller, higher return, and then a smaller but very high return silver asset. It's quite a mix of different assets, but we quite like that mix. We do focus more on cash flow. This year we've done more development. The job's never done, and we have a very active pipeline of new transactions that we're working on right now.
Let me just check the question box. Again, nobody asked a question. Third meeting in a row.
Yeah, maybe we're all doing it.
In terms of transactions, mergers have not been a big part of your growth, all your growth has been organic. Sandstorm advocated in their acquisition with Royal Gold that the merged firm would have a fuller valuation. I'm always cynical about putting two companies together and being bigger. I think that's the propaganda of the investment bankers to earn a fee. Sometimes there's feeble-minded CEOs that just want to be bigger. It was almost a no-premium acquisition because initially Royal Gold went down, and it was a taxable transaction, but it went up $3. The deal was worth about $9.60 when it was announced, and now Sandstorm is $12 plus. What's your view on 2 + 2 = 5 or whether 2 + 2 just equals a banking fee?
Yeah, I agree with the principle that, you know, 2 + 2 doesn't always equal more than 4. Sometimes it does, but it doesn't always. I think growth, in the use of growth, but for no other reason, is a massive red flag, frankly. Our desire to grow reflects our ability to continue to accretively deploy the cash flows the business develops. If we don't see opportunities to do that, then we'll continue to harvest the cash flows we've got. Fortunately, we do find many opportunities to do that, and we don't see it changing. Growth, you know, I'm a shareholder. It's the biggest part of my net worth. The idea of simply growing and destroying per share value is anathema to all of us. I completely agree that the logic quite often doesn't hold. I think in this business, though, they are very scalable.
If you put two royalty companies together, you can run a bigger business with the same headcount as any one of the individual pieces. Unlike a lot of corporate deals you see, the synergy's number is actually real. You take out $20 million of G&A every year. That's kind of a meaningful asset. I think that synergy value does work. There has been a trend arguably to say that, well, are the larger companies more investable? Does it drive a higher multiple? I think it's very difficult to definitively conclude it does because there's instances of smaller companies trading at great multiples. I don't think it's necessarily the case that scale begets multiple. I'd just far rather have a high multiple based on track record, for instance. I don't think it always holds, but I certainly think there are opportunities to put them together.
We acquired Mavericks a couple of years ago. The synergy was very, very real. We stripped out then $8 million a year of cost. There was no synergy magic, synergy voodoo there. It was real cost savings. The assets have been a great fit in our portfolio. We felt we were buying a set of assets at a pretty fair valuation. In that sense, it worked. On the royalty side, corporate M&A is really just an asset deal with complexity. You have to, in my mind, be comfortable that the assets you're buying meet all the same criteria as the assets you buy organically because that's all they are at the end of the day. You're not buying expertise or people or enhanced logistics or anything like that. We look at corporate deals basically the same as asset acquisitions.
What percent of your stock does Elliott own?
They own 63%, 64%.
I'm not thinking from the standpoint of Sheldon and James, but from the standpoint of Elliott. If you were merged, for example, with Royal Gold, they would drop to something like 20% of the merged company. If they ever wanted to shut down their firm and retire, they could sell out. I used to, I was offered one two hundredth of Tiger Management 30 years ago by Gillian Robertson. I would sit on some of their internal committees. He shut down the week that NASDAQ peaked in March of 2001. The peak was him covering his shorts.
Yeah.
All the internet bubble stocks too soon. You never know when a hedge fund guy decides to hang it up.
Yeah, I would disagree with Elliott. Look, Elliott's certainty building.
There's a lot of the election now in merging with a larger company to provide you control and shareholder with liquidity.
Yeah, look, I think there's a couple of pieces there. Firstly, on Elliott, they're intensely value-focused. They've been going for an awfully long time, what, 30 or 40 years. Their track record is staggering. When we started working with them, they had about $28 billion under management, I think it was. Now they have over $70 billion under management. I don't see any likelihood of them deciding to shut up shop. I don't think that is in their organizational DNA. It's such a big group. It would be kind of almost inconceivable. Just on their shareholding in Triple Flag , they've never sold a share, you know, and they've been investing in this business since 2016. To the extent a corporate deal would allow them to dilute down more easily, their focus, from my observations, has always been on value and intensely focused on value.
If there was a deal that was good value for all shareholders, not just Elliott, but all shareholders, our management team is not entrenched. We're very aligned, so they wouldn't stand in the way of a deal. I cannot imagine a situation where they'd force a deal that benefited Elliott to death and the other shareholders. I just don't think it would ever happen.
Probably they're pretty strong gold bulls, so they never would have formed a company and took them as a management.
Their 2016 gold thesis was pretty good. I mean, obviously, a lot of unpredictable stuff's happened over that period of time. Paul Singer has been very public about his view on gold specifically, and he's been proved to be quite correct.
Congratulations and thank you for answering all our questions, including the ones that are sensitive about your control and shareholder.
Oh, you're welcome. John, thanks for your time and for having us to speak.
Oh, we're honored to host you. We admire companies that are successful, and we as investors need to have time for all the smart companies that make us better.
Yeah, thanks, and thanks to all your friends and clients who have joined today. Really appreciate your time. I know it's valuable. Yeah.
Super, super. Congratulations and let's all celebrate $4,000 gold and $48 or $50 silver, whatever it is today. Thank you.
All right, thanks, John. Bye.