This morning, the host, James Dendle, the Chief Operating Officer of Triple Flag Precious Metals, which is a spectacular royalty and streaming company. James, bring us up to speed.
Sure. Thanks, John. Look, we last spoke in October or November of last year. I'll start off by providing a bit of background on the business that I'm sure I know you're familiar with it, and some of your clients will be. We'll cover it off quickly. I wanna spend more of the time we have today just updating you on the assets that within the portfolio that have developed and changed over the last five or six months. With that, I'll turn to our cautionary statements, which you can read at your own leisure, and provide a very brief summary of the business. Triple Flag is a gold and silver-focused streaming and royalty company.
We have and continue to invest in other metals, which I'll touch on later when we discuss what we look for in transactions and our approach to capital allocation. Ostensibly, we're a precious metals company, gold and silver. Market cap is obviously moving around a lot at the moment, but ostensibly $6.7 billion. 2026 guidance is between 95,000 and 105,000 gold equivalent ounces, which we expect to move up to the 140-150 range by around 2030. That's our-
James, excuse me.
Yeah, John.
Why goes the guidance down for this year? Does one of your operators have a reduced guidance?
Sure
Do you have a step down?
It's a very good question, John. The reason is our first transaction was a silver stream called Cerro Lindo in Peru that we struck in late 2016. At the time of doing that transaction, we had a step down milestone of 19.5 million oz silver, which at the time was a couple of million ounces silver more than the stated life of mine planned by the operator. Around Q2 this year, we hit that step down. While nobody likes to see the volumes reduce, it is an indication that investment's been tremendously successful. The mine has developed and produced a couple of million ounces beyond the base underwritten case.
There's another I suppose it would be eight or nine years left of production of that operation, and we continue to get about a third of the silver from Cerro Lindo. That's the reason the guidance for this year is lower than the actual deliveries last year.
Thank you.
Yeah, 239 assets, 34 of which are producing, the rest are exploration and development stage. We pay an annualized dividend of $0.23 per share. All the numbers I'll refer to in this presentation are in U.S. dollars. We've moved that dividend up every year metronomically since going public in May of 2021, and we have about $1 billion of available liquidity. Again, I'll talk about that more when we discuss capital allocation. Our management team and board own about $125 million worth of stock. It's a great degree of alignment, and I think it's very informative as to how the team members and board approach allocating capital and generating value.
I think this page is well known to everyone who's taking the time to look at this presentation, so I won't dwell on it aside to say that we have a very constructive outlook on gold as an asset class and silver as well. I'll just spend some time talking about the history of the company and the track record. John already pointed out the guidance range this year is lower than our deliveries from last year. One other factor of that is Northparkes mined exactly to plan, and that plan had an assumed mining of a relatively high-grade gold pit that was short-lived. We had those ounces come in in 2024 and 2025, and they're being depleted during the course of this year in conjunction with the Cerro Lindo step down.
As I mentioned, we see that number going up to 140-150 in the 2030 timeframe. Triple Flag was founded in 2016. We founded the company as a clean sheet with the idea that the sector could be well served by creative, thoughtful, and patient capital, and there was room for additional provision of stream and royalty finance. That thesis has been borne out over the last nearly ten years. You can see the growth in ounces from 2017 at just over 32,000 all the way to where we are today. The management team here has added each and every one of those assets. We started off with, as I say, nothing. We've amassed this portfolio over the last nearly ten years.
Just to share some of the financial metrics over the recent history. Operating cash flow has grown strongly in conjunction with ramping up volumes from the portfolio, and of course, in 2025, very, very strong gold prices. That has. You can see that on a per share basis. Over that period, we've added NAV through transactions and of course, the value of our existing portfolio has increased as the life of assets has been extended, production capacities have increased, and of course, gold and silver prices have increased over that time period too. We think deeply about allocating capital, and I think this slide is a good illustration of the approach that's been taken since the inception of the business.
At the end of last year, the share capital, so in other words, what shareholders have put into this company stood at just over $1.8 billion. The consensus research NAV for the portfolio of assets stands at $4.5 billion, and then the market capitalization is over $6.7 billion. We're generating in 2025 very strong free cash flows of just over $300 million last year, and that's underpinned by a very long life portfolio. We feel that the capital deployed has created fantastic value. The duration of those cash flows is long, which enables our shareholders to benefit from increasing prices and the optionality that comes with long life robust assets that can expand and add resource over time.
There's a wonderful compounding effect of the cash flows generated in this business, which we then of course redeploy into new streams and royalties. While the prior page showed a overall view of the capital allocation, this page looks at some very specific transactions. One of which I won't go through all of these, but I'll give you an illustration of how this page works. Northparkes is a good example. I'll talk about it more later. It's a copper-gold mine operated by Evolution Mining, which is based in Australia, the asset's in New South Wales. In 2020 we invested $550 million. To date, we've received $240 million of cash flow, and the analyst consensus at today's date is just over $1.1 billion.
There's tremendous NAV accretion with this asset and real cash flows coming back along with the NAV accretion. A few others to call out, Buriticá. We received more than our invested capital around a year and a half ago, and the asset today has just over a quarter of a billion dollars of analyst NAV. Cerro Lindo is a good example, John. We you know, as I touched on at the beginning, it was Triple Flag's first investment in 2016. We put in $250 million. We've received $400 million back, and the consensus NAV of the tail that I referred to after the step down is about $200 million.
That's a mine that's had a very robust track record replacing reserves, and it's been a great asset for Triple Flag. That's a silver stream, I should add. Others that we think will be strong performers in the future, of course, the Beta Hunt. Fosterville's done very well. Impala Bafokeng is an extremely long life asset, so the payback period is slightly longer. That gives you an indication of the sort of returns and profiles we look at. I'll just spend some time on the portfolio. At a high level, Triple Flag has always been and will always be a pure-play precious metals company. When we talk about precious, we're talking about gold and silver. Our largest asset by consensus NAV is Northparkes' 25%.
There's a handful in the low single figures, Impala Bafokeng, Buriticá, Cerro Lindo and Arthur, which is the AngloGold Ashanti project we'll talk about later. The remaining assets form about 51% of the NAV, so quite well-diversified suite of assets across the portfolio. We're 92% by NAV precious metals. By revenue, that's much closer to 100%. The balance is copper, and the other comprises nickel and lithium. I'll talk about the other commodities a bit later on. By geography, strong orientation towards Americas and Australia. We have, of course, like everyone, a preference for established mining jurisdictions with strong rule of law.
It's been fortuitous to the investments we've seen value in have been located in those jurisdictions, and we work hard to continue to develop opportunities in Australia and the Americas in particular. As shown by the chart, you can see a concentration of assets in Australia. We have a number in Victoria. We have Northparkes, New South Wales, a cluster in WA. The majority of the assets by number are of course in the U.S. and Canada. Important assets in Colombia and Peru as well. I mentioned the 239 assets earlier.
We class, as I said, 34 producing, 50 development, which is where we're talking about assets that have a resource, have some form of technical study available, and the rest which are pre-technical studies, so resource and some pre-resource projects comprise the other 155 projects. You know, one of the benefits of the streaming royalty business is it allows us to have a highly diversified base of production that would be incredibly costly and difficult to accomplish and replicate in an operating company. We have the 34 producing assets. The assets shown on this page are among the larger of those. The two biggest drivers of metal deliveries are Northparkes, which is in Australia. Cerro Lindo, which is in Peru. Cerro Lindo is stepping down. It's well-known in the market.
Of course, in part of Africa, in South Africa, operated by Implats, a very established PGM company, and then a series of other operations. Fosterville, an Agnico mine located in Australia. Young-Davidson run by Alamos Gold in Ontario. Buriticá is a Zijin-run gold asset in Colombia, which is an incredible resource. I'll touch on that perhaps if we have time later. Beta Hunt, a growing resource endowment, but also growing production in WA operated by Westgold. Camino Rojo is an all-in mining asset in Mexico. La Colorada is part of Pan American Silver, also in Mexico. We have the Stawell Mine, which is run by a private group in Victoria. Bonikro in Côte d'Ivoire, which is Allied Gold, but of course, that will change hands to Zijin in the near future. Kensington with Coeur in Alaska.
As I said, diversified and oriented towards countries where there's an established mining industry. Mining is a deeply ingrained part of the economy, and most of these assets have very long and consistent track records of delivery. As I mentioned, you know, we clearly don't operate the assets in our portfolio, so it's incredibly important to us to be in partnerships with companies that replicate our values, look after their communities, develop the assets in a thoughtful manner, and drive value in the long term. We're pleased to have a portfolio of really fantastic operators. We have, you know, two assets operated by Agnico. Our largest asset is operated by Evolution, which is a very capable mining company.
Our platinum exposure in South Africa is operated by the highest quality and most amongst the most experienced platinum operators on the planet, which is Implats. Nexa with Cerro Lindo has been a wonderful partner over the entire history of this company. We also enjoy a wonderful relationship with Zijin and highly rate the quality of the work they've done at Buriticá. There are many others, of course. As I mentioned, I would spend some time talking about the assets that have changed since we last spoke. Probably the two most material developments when you look at the business overall are Northparkes and Arthur. Now, we have a few pages on those specifically later on in the presentation, so I will come to those.
While we're on this slide, I'll just talk about some specific assets in the portfolio that our viewers may not be so familiar with. Arcata was one of the founding assets of Hochschild's, a Peruvian mining company. We funded a private operator called the Sierra Sun Group to acquire from Hochschild this asset and restart. The timing was fantastic. The asset was really acquired before the silver price appreciably moved. The company is busy putting the asset back in production. I was there in January. Sierra Sun is a very interesting company. It's private, as I mentioned. They own another gold mine in Peru. They also own a mining contracting business and a mining engineering consultancy.
They're sort of a small private conglomerate in that sense and have an incredible depth of capability and experience in Peru. As I said, they're putting that mine back into production. That mine's produced around 400 million oz of silver in its history and has a huge amount of potential to continue long into the future. We enjoy a wonderful relationship with Sierra Sun Group, and that asset will be ramping up during the course of 2026. There's another part of it called Azuca, which represents an opportunity in the future to bring more ore from a neighboring property to Arcata. It's a very interesting complex, very underexplored, but really set up for a long-term restart of a highly prolific silver asset. We're excited about that. Koné with Montage Gold.
I believe some of the audience will be familiar with the fact that Triple Flag acquired a company called Maverix Metals a few years ago. It was an excellent deal for Triple Flag and a very fair deal for the Maverix team. We acquired a number of very high-quality assets, and one of those assets, which at the time was development stage and, you know, frankly, had an uncertain path to development, was Koné. Martino come in with Montage and has worked tirelessly to take that asset from study stage to a point where it's in construction, it's on schedule, and they're targeting production late this year. We've been very pleased to see the progress of that asset through the portfolio. Similarly, we have a royalty on Eskay Creek.
That, as you all know, is advancing with initial production expected in the near term. El Dorado is a sort of stranded asset that, frankly, we got at a very compelling valuation as part of the Maverix' asset that has been acquired by Aura Minerals and is being advanced through construction. Again, an asset that has really outperformed our expectation over the last couple of years. Similar with that Ana Paula. You know, Heliostar has transformed that business, and reimagined the asset to be a more concentrated underground project, which we think makes a lot more sense. Again, there's no defined timeline to production. They're quoting 2020-2028 in that region. Again, a very, very interesting asset.
High grade with lots of exploration potential. I want to make sure I leave some time to talk about some of the larger assets in the portfolio. We have a 1% royalty on AngloGold Ashanti's Arthur project, and that really is a tier one gold asset. It's in our reckoning, and I think in the reckoning of AngloGold Ashanti, one of the most significant gold discoveries in living memory or in recent memory from the U.S. It's a wonderful asset. We'll go into it in a little bit more detail, as we will in Northparkes as well. I wanna pause on Kemess. Kemess is a very interesting asset. It's a copper gold porphyry in B.C. We have a 100% silver stream on that asset.
We put that silver stream in place in 2018 as part of an acquisition of what was AuRico Metals at the time, and we acquired the Fosterville royalty, the Young-Davidson royalty, Eagle River royalty as part of that acquisition. We did not fund a dollar into Kemess, but we structured the stream and negotiated with Centerra, obviously at a much lower silver price than we are today. The deal was, or the deal is that as soon as Centerra starts expanding capital on a sanctioned project, we have a series of staged deposits that goes into it, a total of $45 million. Kemess was an asset that we thought was very interesting, but essentially laid dormant in Centerra's portfolio for a long time.
Kemess was initially conceived as a, I'd say small to medium scale block cave, and the Centerra team have recently published a PEA that has reset the strategy for mining that project. It will now be an open pit transitioning to underground using a conveyor between the open pit and the established infrastructure in the south part of Kemess, which you can see in this image, includes mill buildings, camp, and power and other site infrastructure. They're quoting its initial production in 2031. We're very excited about Kemess. We think there's a lot of exploration potential there. It's an asset that is highly in the money for us, and we're looking forward to funding our deposit as soon as Centerra starts construction.
We expect a PFS in the next 12 months. I think it's early 2027. That's an asset that really, you know, John, last time we spoke, was somewhat dormant and has advanced tremendously over the last few months. Another one of those assets that has, you know, been sort of sitting out there for us is Hope Bay. You know, we've been watching this Hope Bay project for a long time. The geology is incredibly interesting. There's an 80 km greenstone belt that extends from the north of the deposit at Doris all the way down to Boston. It is largely untested for the majority of that greenstone belt. We acquired this asset as part of Maverix Metals.
At the time, Agnico had just stepped into Hope Bay. It was uncertain exactly how the asset would play out. If we fast-forward to today, Agnico has enjoyed significant exploration success. There's a zone that people who follow Agnico will have seen called Patch Seven, which is part of the system. It was not a known deposit of any note a few years ago. I think the resource has increased 126% year-on-year in Patch Seven, and it just shows the potential of this. It's really a district in one property.
James, Agnico is having their annual field trip May 20 and 21 to Hope Bay.
Yes
Meliadine. They will have completed an updated technical study. I have it in my model as 425,000 oz in 2030. So I'm a little more aggressive than your guidance. It's good for you to be conservative.
Yes, John, we obviously line up our disclosures with that of Agnico. They have a, you know, outstanding track record of delivering against their guidance. I was actually at site with the Agnico team last week. Myself and Sheldon were fortunate enough to join the Agnico team on a site visit. I can tell you the work they're doing is first rate. I think one thing that's striking is, of course, the geology is wonderful. You know this, of course, from having done many of their site visits. The amount of knowledge they have within that business to operate in the north, to handle the logistics, all the challenges that come with operating in that part of the world is incredible.
Of course, building Meliadine and Meadowbank is part of that. You know that knowledge is not valuable if it's not properly communicated and shared amongst team members or if the turnover rates are so high that the knowledge leaves the building every, you know, couple of years. I was struck by their ability to, you know, work collaboratively. There's so much expertise at Hope Bay with people who are at Meliadine. They know the challenges. They know what they need to do differently. And those learnings I think are gonna be deployed to great effect at Hope Bay. We're very excited. Of course, as you say, the 400-425 reflects Agnico's guidance and obviously the construction decisions upcoming and the initial production in 2030.
We're very excited about the potential for Hope Bay. I think the geology is striking. There's very few, you know, completely unencumbered greenstone belts of this scale that are controlled by a single company and indeed a single royalty. We think this has the potential to be one of the most exciting assets in the portfolio. I'd just add our royalty coverage is 1,900 sq km. It covers all of the main Hope Bay belt, greenstone belt, and has a pretty wide area.
Our actual entitlement, and that reflects the claims Agnico has, is well over 2,500 sq km because we have an area of interest so that claims staked in the future within that area of interest are subject to the royalty. I think we'll be talking about exploration results coming out of Hope Bay from all sorts of areas across that property that are currently, you know, not being focused on for many years to come.
James, concerning Arthur.
Mm.
Do you understand why it hasn't gotten blessed with the FAST-41 federal permitting bypass abbreviating the NEPA process? I don't understand why it takes so long.
John, maybe let's come to Arthur as a kind of standalone topic, right? 'Cause I think it's incredibly important. Let us come back to that. We've got a couple of pages just discussing Northparkes and Arthur. Now, those who have been familiar with Triple Flag in the past will know Northparkes, as I mentioned before, is the largest asset. It has an over 30-year history of replacing reserves across multiple porphyries on the property. It was actually initially discovered as a gold asset in the early 1990s before copper mineralization was found beneath the gold assets, the gold areas.
That's really important because it informs some of what Triple Flag and Evolution sees in the exploration potential there, which I'll touch on a bit later on. It's very well capitalized. The mill is permitted to about 8.5 million tons a year. In practical terms, that mill is running at about 7.5 million tons per year, which is good, but the resource is about 500 million tons. At 7.5 million tons a year, it's gonna take a while to get through it. One of the big updates that came out this year that Evolution has been working on is studying the expansion to 10 million tons plus, which is one of the things we always looked at with Northparkes.
The resource size and production rate was incongruous, and we always felt there was an opportunity for that to expand. Evolution's approach to unlocking value through things like exploration and expansion has accorded with that view, and they've cited expansion in the range of 10 million-15 million tons, which we think is about the right range for Northparkes. Very exciting. As I mentioned, the resource base is vast, and that's before getting onto any meaningful exploration across a very large 1,000 sq km land package. Now, I'll just spend a moment on this page if that's okay. The page you're seeing here really is constrained to the mining license, the permitted mining license, which hosts the majority of the plus 500 million tons of resource, and also is the entire history of Northparkes.
The 30 years has pretty much been exclusively on this land package. Now, you'll notice there are some shallow pits at surface. It's worth bearing in mind that when this was initially drilled in the late 1980s, early 1990s, it was for gold. The exploration that was done was generally RC and air core looking for gold down to about 100 m, 200 m. Shallow oxide gold pits that they could treat using CIL. If I was to show you this in three dimensions, what you'd see is a pin cushion of drill holes that are very shallow, 100 m, 200 m. But very, very few drill holes that extend into the fresh rock beneath the gold targets. It's an uncommonly unexplored deposit.
Normally, when we see assets of 30 years maturity, there's been a tremendous amount of drilling done. Northparkes has enough drilling to define a huge resource, but there's a huge amount of blank search space within the mining license, and that's before we get onto the broader property. You can see that in this image here. You know, these porphyries don't tend to occur in isolation. They don't tend to completely break up at depth. The depth of these systems are not quantified. There are no drill holes in those areas. We think there's great potential for the 550 million tons resource to continue to expand over the life of the asset.
Now, of course, the incentive to expand that resource meaningfully right now is small because, you know, even at 10 million tons, you've got, you know, 40-50 years of mining to do, depending on obviously resource conversion. The endowment is staggering. Now, what Evolution has been very smart to do is focus on optimizing the infrastructure, expanding the capacity, and then adding sort of incremental wins across the property. Major Tom, you can see here with the orange logo. E51, you can see here. These are all surface ore sources that can be added to the processing plant. It's a really fresh kind of perspective on approaching unlocking value from Northparkes. Now, as part of that, there's a couple of important features. The mainstay production will be E48 sublevel two, which is...
Level 2, which is sort of in here. There's an E48 sublevel K which is ramping up at the moment, and in the future GRP and E26 lift 3. Importantly for us, though, Evolution has sanctioned the E22 block cave, okay? This is an area of the deposit that has a gold grade a couple of times higher than the average grade of the rest of the porphyry, and will drive gold production for Triple Flag to higher levels out of Northparkes in the latter part of this decade. That's a big capital project. It involves having a ramp from E48 and then a decline from surface. E22 is part of what fills the mill capacity for the 10 million ton-plus expansion. That's sort of how all the pieces tie together.
There's one other part of it which is important, however. There was a deposit that was not in any way incorporated in the life of mine plan when we invested, and indeed in subsequent years, called E44. Now, just moving to this map view, you can see the cluster of operations here in the center of the page that shows the plant and shows everything I showed you on that prior image. E44 is about 21 km from the mining area. It is a gold deposit. It's actually sort of a skarn related deposit. There isn't copper there. And really it was from in our estimation and in the estimation of the prior operator, something of a dormant, you know, option that wasn't really being progressed.
Now, Evolution has identified the opportunity to mine that deposit and treat through the expanded plant. What's interesting in this is that, you know, along the way of the road alignment that you can see in the dashed line between the existing operations and E44 is a great number of exploration targets for copper and gold. As you know, John, as soon as you open up roads, you know, geologists, and I can say this 'cause I'm one of them, are inherently lazy, and we like to sample things that are, you know, easily accessible from the car. You know, we expect that the road to be an interesting source of prospectivity. Okay. Completely changes how we look at Northparkes and completely changes how Evolution can unlock value from the asset.
We're very excited. The stream covers all of the area in this red irregular polygon. That's just over 1,000 sq km of land. All the rocks are the same. It's the same kind of stuff from north to south. The biggest difference is that when you go to the east of the property, there's a shear zone that means the overburden is developed so that in the west and central areas one is generally looking undercover but incredibly prospective, and we're really, you know, very impressed by the work Evolution's done and also excited about the future for this asset. I referred to the endowment earlier. More work has been doing to advance studies on other assets.
The MJH zone is a zone that was not defined as part of the investment case when we entered into Northparkes in 2021. It's new mineralization that's benefiting Triple Flag. GRP was known, but the study's now being progressed and of course E48 and E26 are the continuations of block cave lifts that go deeper. It's really very similar mining method as the deposit progresses. Block cave is a very well-established mining method at Northparkes, and the team there has great expertise in designing and executing and operating block caves in a safe and productive manner. I referred to E22 earlier. This is an important development. It's a key pillar of growing Northparkes. It enables the first leg of the mill expansion to happen. The...
On a 100% basis, it's AUD 680 million of Aussie, that is, of capital expenditure over five years. It's long life. As you know, when you invest capital into block caves, the capital intensity at the front end is high, but the mining costs then are very, very low, as you're relying on gravity and the extraction of ore from the extraction level, and then ore is conveyed to surface to the mine. It's very efficient once established. E22 essentially mines the same material as we mined before. Good gold grades, good copper grades. Big benefit to Triple Flag, big benefit to Evolution. E48 is the existing deposit that's being mined. The sublevel cave is being developed at the moment. I referred to it earlier, but I'll just show you in this picture.
We have access development going across from E48. This provides access to a shaft and decline access to this part of the ore body. So there's a bit more underground materials handling flexibility, more access flexibility. Return shafts proximal to E22, and then a decline going to the surface. There'll be a twin decline configuration with a conveyor. So it provides lots of optionality for the underground operations. We expect initial production from E22 towards the end of 2030. Okay? So we'll see E22 come in. We'll see that done in conjunction with an expanded mill capacity. At around the same time, we'll see the development of E44, which will be going through studies and permitting over the next few years.
All coming together in that sort of 20-30 timeframe. I mentioned E44 earlier. It's a deposit that hasn't really been touched from an exploration point of view for a long time. It currently stands at 8.7 million tons at 1.34 g a ton. It's pretty compelling. The continuity is good. There's lots of exploration potential at the bottom. The mineralization seems to extend. There's gold intersections further down that have not been tested. It's a very interesting deposit that I think is highly likely to grow from the initial sort of 400,000 oz endowment far beyond that. It hasn't been touched from an exploration point of view for many years.
I think the way we've worked with Evolution to unlock the gold potential has great optionality for the rest of the property. There are many other gold prospects across the Northparkes land package. Arthur, you know, really is a wonderful asset. AngloGold Ashanti described it as a marquee asset that will anchor the portfolio into the 2050s. We're really talking about an asset of that scale, big enough to be the anchor for AngloGold Ashanti, but also with a life of mine duration to stretch well into the 2050s. You know, we have a 1% on title Nevada royalty that covers all of the property and all of the exciting areas that are being drilled at the moment. We're very excited about this asset.
I think a really important step was accomplished recently with AngloGold Ashanti. You know, this is one of those assets that one could drill and drill and drill for years and keep adding to the resource. I pulled one of the quotes from their earnings call. You know, Marcello commented that every time we drill, we find more resources. Rather than spend the next, you know, five years running this thing out, we've been very impressed to see how Anglo has defined the reserve for the initial project and is taking it forward. You know, there'll be decades of drilling to do, exploration drilling to do at this project. Best that it's done from an operating mine. We think that the PFS that was recently released looks fantastic.
It also serves as the basis to describe and encapsulate the project in order to, you know, move it forward from a permitting point of view. We're very happy to see that. I think a maiden reserve of 5 million oz at those grades is a really strong start. As AngloGold Ashanti mentioned in their call, it's the tip of the iceberg, and we're confident that this asset will continue to grow for many decades. I think this is well exemplified by this page that just shows the scale and continuity of the gold system we're dealing with here.
The reserve is based on the Merlin deposit, and you can see that the reserve pits here shown in blue really just nips off the corner of the Merlin ore body. There's a huge amount of mineralization beneath the reserve pits that I'm sure over time will come into the reserve. That to us is a great way to start developing this project. Then importantly, our royalty covers this whole area in the center. You've got the infill and increased definition that will convert inferred into indicated measure, then ultimately reserves from Merlin so that'll grow. On the right-hand side of this image, there's the Bear Mountain fault hanging wall target, which is really interesting. Never been tested. It's a downthrown block to the east of Merlin.
To the west, we've got this rhyolite flow mineralization, and then very strong messages from AngloGold Ashanti about the connectivity between Merlin and Silicon, which is largely untested. And even mineralization off to the end of Silicon, which when we went to site looked very interesting. I think the furthest mineralization there was encountered in water well drilling. Just amazing amount of prospectivity. The same chart on the right just showing the scale of the potential pits. Yeah, Arthur's very exciting. John, you asked a question about the FAST-41 permitting. You know, look, obviously we're basing our analysis on AngloGold Ashanti's public disclosure.
It would seem logical to me that there's an opportunity to permit this mine faster on account of it being pretty uncontroversial in many ways and such a, you know, strong project. Now, you know, I won't get ahead of Anglo's public disclosure, but it does seem like there's some potential there.
It may be that they haven't filed to begin yet, and that's why they're not in it. 'Cause they're still doing studies and deciding how to exactly engineer things.
Yeah. If you look at it, you know, they're spending $111 million on studies in 2026. They're starting the feasibility study in June 2026, which will be finalized in Q4 2027. They're starting the federal permitting work, the EIA, in Q1 of 2027. They'll have the project description lined up for that submission. Really, you know, they're not in the process yet because they haven't commenced the filings. I think we'll have much better understanding of how that comes together in about 12 months' time. It. You know, it's clearly a priority project for AngloGold. Look, in summary, we have a highly diversified portfolio of very high-quality streams and royalties, many of which are, as I've tried to explain today, are developing quickly.
There's another 10 assets in the portfolio I could have spent time talking about that are finding new ore, developing towards production, expanding. I didn't even manage to talk about Westgold Resources that's expanding. We're very excited about what we're seeing across the business. You know, our focus remains on growing free cash flow per share. We care deeply about those per share metrics. In doing so, we're focused on quality, we're focused on big mineral systems with a defined pathway to production and cash flow in jurisdictions that we trust and have good tenure, security of title and ideally established mining jurisdictions. Today we're debt-free with a very strong balance sheet. We have about $1 billion of available capital for these acquisitions.
You know, I think that the real focus on per share metrics should be aligned well with our shareholders and the fact that we are as a team large shareholders I think really drives that alignment. The goal is really simple. I mean, these businesses are compounding businesses, and our job here is to reinvest the cash flows in a very accretive manner, drive that compounding, continue to grow the dividend and see the cash flow per share and NAV per share move up over time. Look, John, I'll leave some time for questions and pause there.
Thank you. Everyone is welcome to submit questions from the question box. I'll have a few to start. Could you just review what your most recent cash outlay transaction was?
The most recent transaction that we've announced was really around E44 with Evolution.
Which month was that?
We announced it with our Q4 results in February of this year. That's the transaction that provides us access to the E44 deposits at Northparkes'. What's interesting with that is we were in an interesting situation because we were obviously invested in the asset. Evolution needed to work with us, and we needed to work with them to unlock the potential. We structured a deal that was beneficial for Evolution. It was beneficial for us. You know, it's not always easy to find true win-win transactions. We invested around $80 million. We actually will fund that investment later on this year. In doing so, we've got access to the E44 deposits.
We also have guaranteed minimum deliveries that protect us from timing risk with the development of E44. If for whatever reason E44 doesn't come ahead, we can actually get our money back with a return. That transaction was really, you know, one that was only accessible to Triple Flag by virtue of the investment we already had in Northparkes. That was the most recent.
It was not a competitive auction, it was a relationship transaction.
Yeah. Look, myself, the team, and I worked with the Evolution team over most of 2025 to try and work out, you know, how we could get the best outcome for both companies and, you know, it's been really well received by both sets of shareholders. We're very happy.
What is your second most recent transaction?
Look, a couple we did last year. You know, another would be one. We acquired a royalty from a private family in Chile on Pan American Silver's Minera Florida operation in Chile. Those are two relatively recent transactions. Minera Florida is one of those interesting mines that has a short life of mine for many, many years.
I visited 25 years ago.
There we go. Yeah, exactly. It's still going today, so we hold a royalty there at variable rates across the project.
James, I was trying to make a sort of a backhanded compliment, where Wheaton paid $2,000 an ounce when gold was $4,000 plus 20% upon delivery for Spring Valley in Nevada, which probably doesn't see output for 4 more years. Then in Antamina, they paid $75 an ounce for proven probable measured and indicated, and $45 an ounce if you count inferred. Some companies are more aggressively paying the spot price at record spot prices, and others are, I don't wanna say waiting for a correction, but benefit if the valuations sell down like the last month during the war.
Yeah. Look, I'm not gonna discuss our competitors' deals. I'm much more focused on the transactions we've done and the transactions we're looking at. What I will say is our competitors are smart people who have a you know great track record in the business, and I'm sure they see value and would have a you know maybe a different perspective to what you've just highlighted. But in any case, you know, when we look at transactions, we're looking to have a fair cost of capital, a fair compensation for the risk we take opposite counterparties, and we're looking for assets that have an asymmetry. You know, it really is our view that in investing in these streams of royalties, our investors should participate and benefit from pricing upsides.
In other words, you know, we're not sitting here making an ultra-bullish view of the gold price and pricing that into our transactions. It's just not how we've conducted business, and that should be to the account of our shareholders. We're also looking for assets that have potential to grow, like Northparkes is growing. It's both expanding resource, it's finding new zones proximal to infrastructure, and it's also expanding its throughput. We like that sort of optionality. Where we go into earlier stage projects, you know, one example would be Tamarack, Talon Metals. We look for very distinct mineral systems, right, that have high metal tenor, but also have the potential to be large geological systems. Arthur's a great example of that. Northparkes a great example of that.
The huge porphyry district, the huge epithermal district in the case of Arthur. In Talon, you know, we again in Hope Bay, we've got these sort of belt almost kind of district scale royalty exposures. You know, Talon's, I say, is a good example because, you know, what they're drilling now, and I saw a result, you know, the other week, 15 m at 7% nickel, 7% copper. You know, that is a long way away from where we found the initial resource. You've got to have the coverage and you've got to have the scale of system to make these earlier stage assets interesting in the same way as, you know, Hope Bay is meaningfully more interesting to us as a royalty holder because we hold the entire belt.
James, could you review the year-end balance sheet?
Yeah, sure. I can probably pull up some stuff here for some materials here. Look, yeah I mean, we basically. I've just got. I'll just leave up on screen, financials for the year. You know, I think the two things that are important for us, John, is we've ended the year with virtually zero debt. You know, long term in this business, we regard the ideal leverage ratio to be zero. It's also a business that can handle some gearing. Now, the reason we think that being in that situation is good is we wanna be opportunistic, and you touched on this in your earlier question. When opportunities come along that fit the criteria we're looking for, it's crucial to us to have capital available to deploy.
You know, we're sitting here at the moment, obviously, the cash flow has been generated by the portfolio. They're just adding up. We're seeing lots of opportunities to deploy. The other number we think about a lot is, you know, what is the share capital and the net cash flows deployed into the business, in relation to what we're generating out of it? Those numbers I think are crucial for investors to understand. That figure stood at $1.8 billion, just over, at the end of the year.
When you have short-term balances, how do you invest them?
Yeah, look, I won't go into the details of the cash management that we do. It's obviously defensive. We're not investing those. We're managing the cash as opposed to looking to invest them into things that stand to lose money. We make highly defensive allocations on cash management.
Last year, the operating cash flow was a little over $300 million, and you ended the year with about $70 million in cash. You have $80 million spent on the Northparkes transaction. If nothing changes, you would have close to $400 million in cash at the end of this year.
Yes. Honestly, you know, I think we don't forecast deal flow. We don't target a certain amount of deployment. We believe that in doing so, you can create misaligned incentives. Our incentives are really to grow the share value over the long term. While, yes, you're right, we would be building that level of cash over the course of the year, it is our intention and our expectation that we'll find, you know, further opportunities to deploy our capital into that meet our criteria, and we're seeing a good deal pipeline at the moment. I think stability is the wrong word, but the capitulation of the commodity price may be helpful.
Well, super. Once again, if there's any questions from the audience, please submit them. Could you give an update on Buriticá ? I visited it in January of 2018, and the last five years it's been under Zijin. The old team is telling us about Collective Mining. How much bigger has Buriticá become?
I was actually at Buriticá in August 2025, so last year and Zijin is. The depth of capability that organization has is very impressive. That asset has expanded quite a bit. Every year we've had the stream has increased in terms of gold and silver production and every year they've either met or exceeded the budget they've presented to us at the beginning of the year. During that whole time, they've been a very open and easy to access counterparty. We've enjoyed that. You'll recall, John, that historically the deposit was located above the valley level, and there was the Jagar and Veta Sur portals. As we expected, of course this has now happened, mineralization just keeps extending to depth.
It sort of breaks up into two particularly defined areas, but those veins continue to extend. Now the mine is over the next few years transitioning from mining above the plant level in the hillside to mining deeper parts of the ore body. The deposit itself, peripheral to the deposit is poorly explored. There is tremendous potential all around Buriticá and we have a 1,400 sq km land package and an area of interest that's actually much bigger than that around Buriticá. Any discoveries made in that region benefit Triple Flag. There's also no step down, so we have a completely open-ended exposure there. Yeah, Buriticá has gone very well.
Super, super. There were hopes at the early days that it would ultimately be 25 million oz.
Yeah, I think that's a reasonable target for that deposit. As you know, it takes time to drill these things out.
Sure. James, thank you very much. Congratulations on all the progress and the continued good outlook. Thank you.
Okay, thanks John.
Thank you.