To accomplish returns that are, in a lot of ways, compounded in our favor, that works to the benefit of our shareholders and compounding capital over time. That is why we exist as a business. What do we do, and how do we really find these dislocations in value that we're able to compound for our shareholders? Yes, we talk a little bit different than a mining company because we are different from a mining company. We, at the end of the day, are capital allocators, just like essentially every public company is, and our focus is on compounding those returns significantly over time with the least amount of risk. How do we do that, and why do we think that our business model is the best way to get commodity exposure? We buy legacy mining royalties. We don't finance mining companies.
We buy a very unique instrument or a very unique asset, and that is these legacy royalties that were typically created when someone owned the mining rights and/or the land and sold the mining rights to another party. A lot of times that happens for cash and a royalty, and the royalty is what they hold back and what they keep, and that's the perpetuity interest in the revenue capability of that mineral tenure. That is what we buy. A lot of you would have some familiarity probably with oil and gas royalties. There was a presenter about music royalties. Mining royalties, at the end of the day and on average, are far more valuable than just about any other type of royalty. Some of the reasons for that is the long-life optionality.
A lot of mines, once they come into production, actually expand that production, increase reserves, and you have this compounding function that works in your favor. The biggest risk that we are able to limit for our shareholders and within our exposure to these assets is we're not diluted. One of the issues with owning mining companies is the capital-intensive nature of those businesses means you're having to dilute your shareholders often, usually more than anyone expects and over a longer duration than anyone expects, and the per-share returns get really harmed. With buying royalties, this is not a dilutable interest.
If the mining company—and this happens across our 70 royalties in our portfolio all the time—mining companies are spending hundreds of millions and not billions of dollars on our assets, we do not get diluted when they do that, and we do not have to contribute the capital when that growth occurs, and we realize the benefit of that because our assets, we are essentially getting 1% to 5% of the revenue that an individual mining operation will generate, and that is not diluted based on the cap structure of a mining company and the cap raisings they do. The way that royalties work is it is essentially, in a lot of ways, similar to first lien on the asset. It is more secure and undiluted, and we are able to build a very capital-light, very scalable business around it with a lot less risk.
As I said at the outset, our North Star is compounding per-share returns. We are looking to compound capital at returns that the industry, frankly, has not seen for a very, very long time and do that with as low risk as we possibly can. Some of the edge that we have—I will get more into this—is that on the front lines of our business is a technical team. I found it very hard. I went to Colorado School of Mines. It was for a master's in mineral and energy economics, so not a mining engineer or a geologist, but on our full-time team of six, you would say I am kind of the in-between between the technical team and finance and economics.
On the front lines of our business are the technical folks that understand the nuances of assets, and I think that's really key for a generalist investor that's looking for exposure to precious metals, especially gold. We have the people that are doing the hard work on the front lines, making sure what we're buying. We understand the risk, but just as much also, we understand the upside of these assets, and we're doing it in some of the best jurisdictions in the world for mining. Very quickly, some of this will be already well covered and well known, but again, we're buying pure 1% to 5% revenue interest in mines.
That's allowing us to have leveraged the commodity price, leveraged the mine expansions, reserve increases, and ultimately all of that can be compounded like what we're seeing today in a rising metal price environment where most of our exposure is to gold. There's a lot of exploration upside also when you have a rising metal price environment because an asset that is known but wasn't economic at $2,000 gold is, in some cases, wildly economic now at $3,000 gold and beyond. We have built a business that is very scalable and very diversified. With 10 paying royalties over 10 different assets, you are getting the diversification that most 10 billion mining companies don't even have, and I think that's a real benefit of our business. We're very exclusive in what we buy. We buy these third-party royalties.
On average, some of these assets—we looked at assets that are 100 years old where basically we know about the paper trail, no one else does, and we're able to cherry-pick these legacy assets where the owner of these royalties wants liquidity. How does the deal space occur? It's usually because someone that's owned this asset for a long time and hasn't started paying them wants liquidity, and that's what we go buy. Interestingly, we're speaking at a time when gold is certainly as in vogue as it ever has been. The geopolitical uncertainty, some of the regulations that are happening both domestically here in the U.S. and internationally are causing a lot of uncertainty around the dollar, and gold has been probably one of the biggest beneficiaries of the current climate that we find ourselves in.
We've certainly seen interest in Vox increase because of our exposure to gold. It's a little frustrating because the way our business model works, we can make money with gold decreasing in value, staying static in value, certainly in an increasing environment as well. Interest has picked up notably as gold, as an asset, has come into focus. Interestingly, gold—I would have actually bet the opposite on this—gold's outperformed the S&P 500 over the last 20 years, and you can see the magnitude by which it has outperformed. I would have certainly expected the SPY to have outperformed gold. I do believe we're in an environment where more investors are looking at gold as an asset in their portfolios. Ultimately, a higher gold price is good for our business with a lot of latent exposure and growing exposure to the metal.
Why Vox and why I built Vox alongside our team is it's great that gold has done actually pretty well over the last 20 years and over the last 100 years. It's also outperformed the S&P 500, but there's a small subsector of the hard rock mine commodity industry that's outperformed the physical being gold, the mining indexes, and the S&P 500 as well by a very significant margin, and that's been the large mining, royalty, and streaming companies. They have outperformed because of the quality of these assets being undiluted, having the benefit of diversification. They're outperforming, and one of the things that can get lost as an investor is like, "That's great. They're outperforming." They're doing it with a lot less risk. Very capital-light businesses, I mean, essentially very almost nil on fixed costs.
If our investor base said, "Hey, Kyle and the rest of the team, we don't want you to grow anymore," there's a few hundred thousand dollars of fixed costs of making sure the checks that are supposed to come in do, and they're the right numbers. They're very unique businesses. We're a very unique business in that capacity. The fact that it outperforms and does it with a lot less risk, I think, is very notable and one of the reasons why Vox was built in the first place. When you look at our business and how to think about it, a lot of the key risks of mining are obviously the technical side of it, the metallurgy, the mining engineering, mine development, permitting. We're analyzing all that risk and cherry-picking opportunities that have the lowest levels of those risks but a significant amount of upside.
One of the key criteria that we look for, most of our assets are actually managed and operated by the world's largest mining companies. We are not exposed to the junior end of the sector, which has a lot of challenges, and where we are somewhat exposed to it, we've gotten that exposure for nil prices. It hasn't been something we've targeted, but in Australia, the capital markets are so strong for mining companies, it's hard to draw any analog in the mining industry to how strong Australia is. We're about 70% of our exposures. We're the largest relative weighting of any royalty company to Australia, and by almost all accounts, and certainly from our perspective, it is the best place to own mining royalties.
The level of activity there with gold chasing AUD 5,000 in their local currency per ounce, it would be comparable to maybe West Texas and the oil patch there when oil hits $90 and above. Australia is uniquely able to capture a rising gold price environment probably better than anywhere else. One of the big reasons is you can permit a mine there in under two years. In North America, we're looking at 17 to 20 years on average to develop a mine. Permitting timelines can be 10 to 20 years on average very easily. Australia really eliminates a lot of that risk and allows us to find opaqueness around great assets that we can price in our favor. Quick overview on Vox. I'll pick the highlights of our cap table. One of the things that I think is the most important is we have a very aligned management team.
Management total owns about 11% of the company. I own about 7.5% of the business, and I'll tell you, after being involved in the capital markets for a long time and being involved on both sides of the equation, it matters a lot. Every decision we make is with a shareholder focus and mindset and around maximizing the long-term value of this business. Our win is not going to be increasing salaries and management compensation. Our win is going to be through share price maximization, and I think we've demonstrated that discipline and that shareholder focus and shareholder-first mentality. Really, we've been around for over 11 years, but as a public company over the last five years. The other important thing to note is our cap table. You have good companies with bad cap tables.
We worked on a very disciplined basis to keep one of the tightest cap tables and one of the best balance sheets in our industry. We have no warrants. The minimal options that are outstanding are management options and no convertibles, no different share classes. Very, very streamlined, very shareholder-friendly by design. I am the second largest shareholder in the business, and as a consequence of that, we've been able to, I think, attract the right kind of investors. BlackRock was a recent investor, U.S. Global in San Antonio. Gold 2000 Conway is one of our biggest institutional shareholders. They're a value-based gold hedge fund out of Europe. The family office that founded us, we started with only really $5 million of investable capital back in 2014. We've compounded that very successfully.
They still speak for a large piece of our shares outstanding and are great supporters of the business. If there's ever a company that I think is extremely well positioned to benefit from this rise in interest and rising metal prices, I think ours is. The other thing that I mentioned is we're very heavy precious metals focused. That's not because we're necessarily gold bugs. It's because that's where we've actually found the best value. Time after time, within our royalty database, which we'll touch on later, we have over 9,000 royalties, legacy royalties in this proprietary database, about 70% of it's gold. The reason why we're gold-weighted is not this gold bug fixation on the asset. It's where we found the deepest value with the least amount of risk, and that's very significant to understand as a potential shareholder in our business.
Also, very low geopolitical risk. We are the highest relative weighting to Australia. It is the most efficient jurisdiction from a permitting perspective. It has some of the best miners in the world. It has some of the best geology in the world, and importantly, so much infrastructure around gold. It is really, again, hard to draw an analog other than to say a really active oil patch in the U.S. There's just not that much infrastructure for mining anywhere else in the world. What happens is we're able to find deposits that would be locked. They would need $500 million to have to go out and build a mill, and then it would make that asset uneconomic.
The fact that there's so many gold mills and has been for so long, you can take what would otherwise be a stranded deposit, easily bring that online with very low amounts of capital in a very permitting-friendly jurisdiction with really high-quality miners. That does not exist anywhere else in the world, and so we've benefited from that quality of being heavily exposed to Australia. As I noted, most of our exposure to the large cap operators, and notably, again, most of our exposure in Australia, we're Aussie dollar gold chasing over AUD 5,000 an ounce. These are really healthy companies with really buoyant capital markets, with an abundance of capital flowing into mining companies, whether you're large cap, mid cap, or small cap right now, and their operating margins are expanding rapidly, further incentivizing more investment.
It's almost every two weeks, mining companies are spending billions of dollars on our assets this year. We're getting all the benefit of that. They're rapidly developing their assets. They're expanding assets, and that is all working to our benefit and to our shareholders' benefit as Vox. I won't get into the details of this slide. All I have to say is if you're a shareholder in Vox, you get the benefit of this continued progress against our assets that we're not spending money on. We're not spending labor or resources on. These mining companies are working extremely hard to develop their assets, bring their assets into production, and expand their assets.
We're getting the benefit of that every single day, and we have news almost every couple of weeks on something going better than expected within our portfolio with the market dynamics the way that they are and also our ability to pick uniquely really good assets that have the fantastic development timelines that we target with lower levels of risk that might impair that timeline and the success of these mines. A quick highlight on our returns. We have put approximately $50 million in total to buy these legacy mining royalties. Notably, since 2019, when we bought the world's largest proprietary database of legacy mining royalties, we put about $40 million to work buying those assets. Early days, when we only had $5 million of investable capital, we were picking assets that were way farther out from production.
We had to diversify a very small sum of money against projects that had relatively smaller quantum royalties over them. Now, since we bought the royalty database, our systems, our processes, our people, our advantages have gotten stronger. That $40 million that we put to work since 2020 will be fully paid back on it this quarter, and we will be completely paid back on everything we put out to date next year, and that is the highest returns in the industry and still an 8 to 20 year mine life on average across our assets to go and building. It is uniquely one of the highest returning businesses in our industry. Again, I will say it, we are not risk-free. No business is, but we do it with a lot less risk than many of the companies and businesses you would have been exposed to in years past.
One of the unique things that we target is we target very simple ore bodies. Our team of mining engineers and geologists are looking for simple ore bodies, contiguous geology, and ultimately assets that we think are also going to be expandable. We are buying assets really for very, very good valuations in our favor for where they sit today, but also assets that we believe are going to give you the optionality of, say, Franco-Nevada in Nevada, who is kind of the grandfather of our industry. Also, side note, probably the best analog to what we do now, they were buying royalties in Nevada in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They are now a $25 billion business and have been one of, if not the most successful mining-related businesses in history. What they did in Nevada, we are doing present day in Western Australia.
That's probably the most simple analog to draw. What we look for are these assets that have the optionality where, yes, we're getting a great return for what we know now, but assets that we think have a tremendous amount of potential beyond that when they drill further and they move to expand. Take what Franco-Nevada did with an asset called Golds trike. They bought it for $2 million in 1986. It's paid them $1 billion to date. It still has another $1 billion to pay them and will probably go farther than that.
I'm not saying we have a Golds trike in our portfolio, but it is the kind of dimensions that we're hoping to target within our portfolio, and you can see how many open pits, how many gold assets we have, and it's operated by some of the largest, if not the largest gold mining companies in the world. This gives you a very quick snapshot of where we've been. Again, early days, we were buying assets farther out from production. Now we're buying assets on average two and a half years before they start production, where the owner of this royalty really needs liquidity. We're providing that use and that liquidity for them for whatever the need may be. You could see the growth profile that we've realized. Now, again, notably, this is organic. This is what's in the portfolio now.
This does not include the assets that we're going to go out and buy. I'll tell you, I believe our future track record is going to be stronger than what we've delivered historically. We're also going to show the market that we can scale. We can buy bigger assets still in uncompetitive waters at great returns that moves the needle more significantly. That's been a big question for the market: that's great. Little Vox Royalty buys these little assets for little sums of money, and look, they do pretty well. Can that actually scale and can it move the needle more? It's going to be pay attention. I think we are going to have the proof of that question very shortly, and I'm excited about that. We do pay the highest dividend in the industry.
Not that the dividend yields of any of our peers or comps or large caps would blow you away, but it is. We have been compounding that dividend since we inaugurated it three years ago at about 7% per annum, and we're dramatically undervalued versus almost any peer set that you could pick in our industry. We believe there's a lot of room to go in terms of us catching the rest of our peers and the intrinsic value of what we believe our portfolio is worth. Now, look, we're compounding capital. We're buying assets fundamentally much cheaper than where we trade. Everything we're doing is still very much accretive, but we certainly believe that we're undervalued versus most of the industry. Meanwhile, we have a better portfolio that's growing faster and I think will earn the multiples that are on the right side of these slides.
Given we're short on time, I won't spend too much time on this slide. There is an abundance of catalysts. We are having, on average, two to four new assets come into production each year. That's by design. We're buying assets pre them going into production. That's where we can price assets well in our favor, and then they're crystallizing in value as they come into production. We have an amazing growth profile. Again, we do not have to spend any of the money for these assets to expand and come into production. You're getting the benefits of a capital-like business, strong organic growth, and a business that's very focused on driving long-term value for its shareholders. With that, that's the end of prepared remarks, and I'll open it up to Q&A.
Does a strong gold price make it easier or harder to do M&A?
The question was, does a strong gold price make it easier or harder to do M&A in terms of other royalty companies or in terms of buying individual royalty assets? Look, historically, I would have told you no, but I would say we have seen some sellers—this was really last year—kind of back away at the last minute or ask for a higher price. We do not chase gold higher. We have a tremendous portfolio that was bought with the expectation that gold's going to be around $1,500 an ounce. We do not have to chase prices higher. We are also somewhat agnostic when it comes to metal. Right now, a lot of our portfolio is copper and copper gold. We will still find great gold deals because, again, we are targeting assets that are two to five years out from production. On average, it is two and a half years.
The biggest conversation is around development timeline and development probability, much more so than gold price and paying up for where the gold price has moved on a short-term basis. I think we're more insulated from that risk, but within our industry, it is a challenge. If you're financing mining companies, you better believe they're asking for gold at $3,000 an ounce. It is one of the unique benefits of our business model.
I saw a bunch of insider sales last year.
This is a really fun question to answer. He saw a lot of insider sales last year. Look, I'm happy to talk about it. 99% of my net worth is in this business. One of the incentive structures that we get is called RSUs. Those are taxable when they vest. Yeah.
Unfortunately, not driving around the Maseratis and Lamborghinis, and so it takes some sales to actually cover the taxes. Look, I'm a strong believer in how our business is positioned, very excited to be a shareholder, and rest assured, as exposed and will benefit as much as anybody for the success of this business. Yes.
I have a question on capital allocation. I'm just trying to understand a little bit better. You pay a really high dividend compared to your peers, as you mentioned here, which also mentioned having some of the best returns in the industry. Peers, why do you think it's more useful to pay a dividend versus continue to reinvest within the business?
Yeah. The question is, why do we pay a dividend versus basically reallocating all of that capital? We could probably talk about this for an hour.
We have two minutes, I think, is all we have left. Long story short, we're compounding capital at such a high amount versus our industry is targeting 1% to 3% returns. Our current return per annum is over 20% for dollars invested. We're paying a little dividend compared to the capital that we're able to, frankly, deploy and then bring back. We have compounded cash at 90% per share over the last three years. Our dividend growth rate's only been 7%. It is a way for us to avail ourselves to more shareholders. Because the mining industry is so capital-intensive and so many people are averse to it, a lot of people will not invest in our industry unless you pay a dividend. It is one of the ways that we can avail ourselves to more shareholders, and it also enforces discipline.
Ultimately, we're either going to be bought by someone that has a lower cost to capital, or we're going to buy back all of our stock, or we're going to be someone that pays almost all of it out in a dividend. We are on the path that we think is well-balanced and is most attractive to the widest audience of shareholders. Warren Buffett would say, "Don't pay a dividend. Just keep compounding it." I understand that remark. Any last questions?