Waiting on you. You're presenting.
Oh.
You ready to present?
You want us to do the presentation or?
Yeah.
Okay. All right, let's go. Next presentation we have for you is Vox Royalty, which is a really unique value-oriented business with interesting exposure and diversity, I think, across the industry in terms of region as well as commodity. As Dave mentioned at lunch, a lot of the ideas come from investors. One of the investors in the room gave us this idea a few years ago. They have really been a quality management team that's building something that's truly unique in the space. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Spencer and let him give you some details. Spencer.
Thanks, Dave.
Hi, everyone. I'm Spencer Cole. I'm the Chief Investment Officer of Vox Royalty Corp. Before I dive into it, I guess I'll just set a little bit of context around the tailwinds that our business is experiencing. Gold's obviously at a record level right now, but a lot of generalist investors are asking themselves, what's the safest and smartest way to play the gold price, particularly if you're not a mining engineer or not a geologist? It's for these exact markets that Vox was created and founded by two family offices back in 2014. These two family offices out of the U.S., one in California, one in Florida, they wanted a leveraged exposure to metals without all the shenanigans and games common to the junior mining industry. They weren't mining engineers or geologists, so they didn't know how to pick the right mines.
They did not want to deal with all the operational issues of actually dealing with running a mine. Vox was created by generalist investors for generalist investors with a management team of mining engineers and geologists. I am an Aussie mining engineer. On the front lines of the business, allocating capital using value investing principles to compound per-share returns and delivering some of the highest rates of return in the entire mining industry. I guess that is the backdrop and why we were created for markets exactly such as the markets we find ourselves in today. I will be making some forward-looking statements, so I refer you to the disclaimer in our corporate deck on our website. Mining is a tough business. I should not say this, but when you look at the returns across the industry over the last few decades, it is a borderline Ponzi scheme.
There is a lot of generalist investors that say to us, "I will not touch the mining sector." We understand it. There is a lot of generalists here in the U.S. that were burnt by junior mining promoters five or 10 years ago. For that reason, mining equities have historically underperformed key equity indices, S&P 500, you name it. It is a risky business. It is a tough business to be consistently successful through the cycle. It is capital-intensive. There is perennial dilution. Fundamentally, a lot of mining management teams do not really have strong capital allocation principles. Vox was purpose-built to solve these specific issues. Our North Star is compounding per-share returns, as I mentioned. We are not here to run the biggest company. We are not here to have vanity metrics like the highest revenue. We are here for the highest rate of return on a per-share basis.
We were created by investors for investors. We, as a management team, own 10% of the company ourselves. Four of my brothers and sisters own Vox stock. On top of that, this is truly a shareholder-aligned business. When you include the board, we have over 20% insider ownership. Every dollar that we allocate to new royalty investments, it is our own capital that we are allocating. We have been built and refined using competitive advantages and intellectual property that we have sort of refined over the past 10 years. We have developed the world's largest proprietary database of mining royalty contracts. I will talk more about this later. This database of over 9,000 royalties allows us to find forgotten royalty contracts that are sitting in very esoteric hands that cover mines that are just about to be built.
For example, we acquired a producing iron ore royalty from a telecommunications company. We acquired another gold royalty from an automotive parts company. Another gold royalty from a hearing aid technology company. This sounds like weird and wonderful case studies, but this is how we find deep, deep value within the mining royalty industry, is finding forgotten contracts that none of our competitors would even dream of knocking on the door of a technology company about a mining royalty contract. We are a very capital-light and headcount-light business model. Our entire management team is a team of six senior executives. We could triple the size of our royalty portfolio without hiring any additional headcount. We have a lot of operating leverage in front of us, which we do not need to hire additional headcount to capture. Last point, we are an unapologetic group of mining nerds.
We love this stuff. This is a treasure hunt finding old dusty contracts where if you find the right contract, you can generate tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. We get out of bed and we are excited about this treasure hunt and this niche that we have been in for over 10 years. What do we do? We focus on return on capital and return on capital on a per-share basis. The second bullet point is really important. There are some other royalty companies out there like Franco-Nevada and some larger ones who fund mining companies. We do not fund mining companies. That is not our core business. Our core business is legacy royalties or secondary royalties.
We find the prospector or rancher that 20 or 30 years ago sold the gold rights to their claims or their ranch in return for a royalty contract that's typically 1%-2% of revenue if that discovery is ever turned into a mine. We're typically acquiring these royalty contracts between one to three years before the mine is built. I mentioned our strong competitive advantage, our unique intellectual property in our royalty database. That is really—that's sort of core to our business of being able to find uncompetitive deal flow. In terms of our royalty portfolio, we've constructed it with extremely low risk per dollar of cash flow. We offer some of the lowest geopolitical risk in the entire mining industry. Ninety percent of our portfolio is weighted towards Australia, U.S., and Canada.
The majority of this, about 75% of this, is weighted towards Australia, which I'll touch on a bit later on. We focus on very low-risk mines, simple, shallow, open-pit gold mines that have been mined and processed that way for the better part of the last 50- 100 years. Anytime we see an esoteric mining risk, either a deep mine or a really complicated ore that needs 10 PhDs to process it, we just walk away from that risk. Because we think for our generalist investors that we work for and that we serve, they do not want complex mining risk. That is why they have invested in Vox. We remove those esoteric mining risks that commonly go wrong in this industry. You do not need to take on those risks, so why should we take those risks on? As I mentioned, we are a team of in-house technical experts.
There's no agency issues where we're farming out our technical diligence to consultants. We're mining engineers and geologists and owners of the business. So the diligence we do is in-house so that we have accountability for the outcomes. We own the results of our analysis. A little bit about our capital structure. We've got approximately 51 million shares out, no warrants, approximately $180 million U.S. market cap. All the numbers I share will be in U.S. dollars as our functional currency, approaching $10 million of cash on the balance sheet. We just acquired a new royalty last month and drew down $11.7 million of debt, so net debt of approximately $2 million. And then a little bit about our register, our share register. We've got 20% insider ownership across board and management.
We have some of the largest mining specialist funds on the register, so groups like U.S. Global out of San Antonio, Texas. That's Frank Holmes and his team. Gold 2000, or otherwise known as Conwave, one of the largest gold funds in Europe based out of Zurich, and BlackRock World Mining Trust out of London. I think we're actually the smallest-cap company in that entire sort of $5 billion BlackRock fund. We have been speaking to that team for four years. Four years ago it was, "You're too small and we don't trust your returns." Last year it was, "You're still too small, but we do trust your returns because we've backtested them for four years." We were happy to see BlackRock taking a position on the register in the past 12 months.
We have a growing base of investors, family office investors, through Stephen and his team and John, thankfully, introducing us to the network here at Three Part. I'd say the incremental buyer of our stock is through our Nasdaq listing, and it's U.S. generalists and family offices looking for leveraged exposure to gold through a royalty model. A little bit about our royalty portfolio. We're 70% precious metals. The majority of that is gold. Ultimately, we're value-focused. Where we see value in, say, a copper royalty or an iron ore royalty, any sort of hard rock mined commodity, we will aggressively pursue that value. It just so happens that we like gold.
We like the fundamentals of the gold price, but also most gold mines tend to have less technical mining risk, and there's just more gold royalties in existence because it's been the most explored for metal. I mentioned our low geopolitical risk already. We have a portfolio of 70 royalties today. Eight of them are paying. Over the next three to four years, that's expected to be north of 20 based on organic growth in the portfolio. I guess what have we been up to over the past 12 months, particularly for existing Vox investors in the room? We've had a really sort of productive 12 months. We've had five separate gold deposits that have commenced production. These are all gold open-pit projects in Western Australia.
We have a handful of other gold projects that are expected to come online in Western Australia over the coming 18 months. Last month, we acquired a really exciting producing copper royalty in South Australia for approximately $12 million. We bought that royalty for about three and a half times revenue. A very attractive price paid for that royalty. A lot of characteristics about that asset that we are excited about that I will touch on shortly. We just received notification in the last few weeks that we are expected to be added to the Russell 2000 Index. The effective sort of inclusion date is on the 27th of June.
We expect over the next two weeks, based on third-party analysis, something in the order of about 5 million shares potentially has to be acquired by index funds, which on a daily base, we're trading somewhere between 400,000-600,000 shares. When you do the math, 5 million shares that has to be acquired is certainly no small amount of liquidity. We increased our dividend for the third consecutive year in February. Last year, we reduced our operating costs by 9%. We're really trying to maximize our operating leverage for investors. Obviously, top-line revenue growth is key, but also as important, cost control and squeezing our cost base lower is critical as well. As we project out over the coming sort of 18 months, we have four to five different assets that we expect could come into production over that next 18 months.
A lot of embedded revenue growth without any additional acquisitions just in the current portfolio. I will not go into too much detail on this Kanmantoo copper royalty acquisition. All I will say is that acquiring a producing copper royalty for three and a half times revenue in this industry is extremely uncommon, particularly in a safe operating jurisdiction like South Australia. One of the things we really were excited about with this opportunity is that this mine has been mined for over 10 years. The initial 10 years was as an open-pit. They invested over $200 million building the mine. The processing plant is significantly larger than what they are currently mining at the moment. They are only using 40% of the processing capacity.
Our expectation is over the next couple of years, if they can start utilizing more of that processing capacity, there's a considerable amount of volume growth from this royalty property with no incremental capital required to be invested to sort of expand production just using that latent processing capacity. The operator, which is an ASX-listed group called Hillgrove, has a 60,000-meter drilling program, which is quite a large drilling program for this year, which we expect will yield mine life extensions. Coming back to our overarching portfolio, on the left-hand side, you see our weighting by country and jurisdiction. Heavily weighted towards Australia, as I mentioned before. Part of this reason is because we buy royalties before they come into production, we want the world's most mining-friendly jurisdiction.
We want ample capital, ample labor, skilled labor, and most importantly, we want a government that is pro-mining that where the timeline to get a mine permitted is extremely short. Those conditions are maximized in Western Australia. Unfortunately, in the U.S. and Canada, you're looking at the timeline to permit a new discovery is around 15 years. In Western Australia, we've got numerous examples in our portfolio of between three to five years to permit a new discovery. Yeah, for a company that is focused on maximizing the probability of a new mine being built, Western Australia is about as good as you can get. On the right-hand side of the slide, this is a bit of an anomaly for a company of our size, a relatively small royalty company, that 2/3 of our operating partners are over $2.5 billion market cap.
We're glad to see our operating partner friends from Alamos here at the conference today. If you're not aware of Alamos, fantastic gold miner with assets in the Americas. I'd highly recommend checking out Alamos. Very good capital allocators. Yeah, we're grateful to have such large balance sheets ultimately developing our royalty properties. What this means is for every dollar that we invest in acquiring royalties, we see a sort of 10-50 to 1 multiplier in terms of the amount of capital our operators are investing in these properties in the ground, which is hugely positive for our investors as these mines are brought forward and royalty revenue is accelerated. Most people are aware that gold's at a record price at the moment or near record price.
What people do not necessarily realize is what does that mean for some of these in local currency terms. Because 52 of our 70 royalties are in Australia, when you look at the Australian dollar, it is quite weak at the moment. When you convert the U.S. dollar gold price of $3,200 into Australian dollar terms, it is over AUD 5,000 an ounce. Our Australian operators are selling gold at AUD 5,300 an ounce, and their cost base is in Aussie dollars. The margin expansion that our Australian operators have seen is also at a record level, which means more free cash flow for them to reinvest in the ground in our properties. This is just a snapshot of some of our return on invested capital generating multiples of 2x to up to 14x on select royalty investments. This is really sort of a key success metric for us.
We're typically getting paid back within sort of two and a half years on our investments on mines that have lives of anywhere from sort of 10-15 years. By the end of this year, we expect to be fully paid back on the total $50 million of capital we've invested in this portfolio of 70 royalties. From here on out, yeah, we expect to be fully paid back from 2026 onwards effectively. This is a brief snapshot of our revenue growth over the past sort of five years. When we went public in 2020, we were essentially pre-revenue, but we knew that we had a lot of embedded revenue growth on properties that were just about to come into production.
What I can tell you is we firmly believe the next 10 assets that are expected to come online in the coming three or four years will be a considerably larger revenue quantum than the revenue growth we've already demonstrated. We are really excited about the organic revenue growth that we expect over the coming quarters and coming years. We do pay a dividend, but candidly, I would not say we are a dividend yield story today. The dividend was really important, particularly for our long-term investors, some of whom have been invested for over 10 years. For those folks, this is a double-digit dividend yield on their cost basis. I would say we would probably be classified as more of a growth at reasonable price or GARP story rather than a dividend yield story today.
Despite everything I've shared with you, we still trade at a discount to consensus broker price targets. Now, I should also add that the five brokers that cover us, they do a fantastic job, but no one's going to model 70 royalties. You just give them the amount of time it would take. Most of them get to a buy recommendation modeling our top sort of 15-20 assets. They will effectively ascribe zero value to the other 50-odd royalties. Just last night, one of our operating partners announced in Australia that they're going to be fast-tracking one of our gold royalty properties, the Horseshoe Lights property. We expect that will now come into production in the coming months. Speaking to sell-side analysts, I think the consensus value on that royalty is zero. There is potential that will be $1 million a year going forward.
I'd say that that's a key gap in some of the sell-side models is some of these smaller Australian royalty assets the brokers ascribe zero value to. That's part of the opportunity, I think, with Vox is that our Australian royalties, we believe as management, don't really get the full value and full visibility that they deserve. In terms of what's coming up, we've got a lot of catalysts, even just if you focus on organic growth. Whether it's six months, 12 months, or two years, we've got a number of key royalty properties that are expected to come into production. One that is worth calling out is Red Hill in that sort of two-year bracket. This is a fairly recent gold discovery in the last couple of years. We've got a 4% gross revenue royalty on this property.
It's about a 2 million-ounce gold property. The operator of this property is a group called Northern Star Resources. They're investing $1.5 billion on expanding the adjacent processing plant. That's expected to largely be complete by the middle of next year, which is a catalyst that we believe will re-rate the value of that Red Hill royalty. We paid approximately $5 million for that Red Hill royalty with eight other royalties in a portfolio. We expect Red Hill, that one asset alone, to generate north of $10 million, $10-$15 million per annum once it comes into production. A really key growth asset for us. Yeah, just a wealth of organic developments within the portfolio from our operating partners bringing properties online.
Then on top of this, we're working on some really exciting acquisitions, looking at acquiring some additional gold royalties, some copper royalties in Australia and also in Latin America, particularly. With that, I will take a breath, and I'd really welcome any questions from anyone. Thomas?
Spencer, well done on your amazing work with Red Hill and your fantastic stories around 4% royalty divided across the agency. If you just look back and give us a bit of a picture, which is the most competitive field right now in terms of acquisition of new royalties, let's say commodity, geography, size-wise, and so on, and which are those that are kind of orphaned and sort of look for plug-ins going forward in this stage in the capital cycle?
Yeah. No, it's a good question, Thomas.
Around where we see the most competition within the industry, I would say the greatest level of competition we see is in Canadian and U.S. gold royalties, and more specifically, gold royalties in Nevada and Ontario, typically. I'll give you an example. Two weeks ago, or actually, it was about a month ago, one of our competitors was acquired for just over $400 million, a group called Orogen Royalties. The circular for their investor shareholder meeting came out last week. What it disclosed was effectively their key flagship asset is a gold royalty in Nevada called Silicon. This gold royalty will not be in production until at least 2030, maybe 2031. What their investor circular shared was that four separate royalty companies were bidding against each other for a period of five months to acquire Orogen.
The successful bidder, Triple Flag, that is paying over $400 million just for this relatively early-stage gold royalty, it was their fifth bid that was successful. That is a gold royalty in Nevada that is still six years away from production. There were four separate listed companies bidding up to five times to be successful. If that is not the definition of hyper-competition, I do not know what is. Another recent example is two weeks ago, Franco-Nevada paid $1 billion for a gold royalty on the Cote Lake mine. It was an aggressively shopped, it was an auction for a well-known gold royalty owned by a family of bakers in Northern Ontario. Anyway, this family, their claim to fame is they innovated and created the two-bite brownie, which I am told is a very popular dessert in Canada.
Anyway, this family of bakers ended up owning this property of land, and they effectively created a gold royalty a couple of decades ago. Some Canadian bankers ran an auction. Franco-Nevada was successful, winning the auction, I think, just over $1 billion. The IRR on that deal, based on broker benchmarking, is somewhere between -1%- 1%. Franco-Nevada is assuming the mine life will double or triple. They're assuming almost spot gold. Gold stays at $3,200 an ounce. They're assuming everything goes right and then some just to even generate a 3%-5% IRR. Those are two recent examples in the past month of gold royalties in Nevada and Ontario that were just so competitive, it makes your eyes water.
The flip side of that is the salty prospectors we deal with in Western Australia, some of which do not even have email addresses because they are off the grid, we are the first royalty company they have ever heard of. The lack of competition in those types of opportunities is spectacularly in our favor. Yeah, it is not to say we will never acquire gold royalties in Nevada or Ontario, but we just do not believe that is a sustainable path to alpha or returns at all. Any other questions? Bill?
In the last couple of weeks, Spencer, there was an announcement that a very large, what, trillion or more iron ore deposit was found in Western Australia. Are you—and you did not put that up on any of your slides—iron ore anywhere. Are you at all involved with that?
I know what you're referring to, and I think my understanding is it's a reinterpretation of some regional sort of geology formation across the Pilbara region in Western Australia. We do have two iron ore royalties in our portfolio. It was a sensational sort of eye-catching headline. Tens of billions of tons of iron ore. The reality is that region has hundreds of billions of tons of iron ore already in it. The bottleneck is port capacity, and it's billions of dollars to expand that port capacity. We're already almost two times paid back on those iron ore royalties. Our view on iron ore prices internally is that they will mean revert over the coming years. We expect that royalty will continue to pay and be a meaningful revenue generator for us.
I would not say that we are looking to deploy meaningful capital into iron ore royalties just based on our view on supply and demand. I think that sort of reinterpretation or that headline, I do not think that will directly impact us, certainly not in the short to medium term.
If I may dovetail on your answer. Relative to capital spending, just to be clear, you are simply a royalty owner. If a mine is going to expand, it costs you nothing.
Nothing. No.
You are simply the beneficiary of someone else spending the capital to expand the production.
Correct. Yeah. We do not fund the mining company. We do not fund the CapEx at all. We actually fund the retirement of the prospector who made the original discovery and retained the royalty. Yeah, it is quite a unique sort of distinction.
You have no cash outflow after the initial purchase. You simply hold for cash inflow.
Correct. Yeah.
Thank you. Yeah. The Horseshoe asset and the operators of that, and tell them.
Yeah. Who are the operators of our Horseshoe Lights royalty? The operator is called Horseshoe Metals. This is an interesting dynamic that we love in Western Australia. There are a lot of junior mining companies that are so sort of fixated on being able to tell their mates, "Hey, I'm a producer now." They will opportunistically do deals with neighbors who have a processing plant. They might give away 50% of the profit or they might give away the lion's share of the free cash flow to access their neighbors' processing plant. In this case, it is Melody Gold, a private operator next door.
For us, because we're getting paid a percentage of revenue, we don't really care how it gets into production as long as it's sustainably brought into production. In this case, our royalty is a 3% revenue royalty. Once they start producing, we get 3% of the revenue.
I have not had the royalty.
They're starting with the gold stockpiles on site. It's going to be a really interesting case study.
Very sensible. Commission Latin America? Is it sort of top-down, which works in jurisdictions for everything, or which is?
LATAM's an interesting one. Two years ago, we hired our sixth team member, Eduardo Cervantes, who's a Mexican national or dual Canadian-Mexican. Thankfully, he can speak Spanish. The rest of us, gringos, can't speak much Spanish. Eduardo's been focusing a lot on Latin America.
Yeah, I'd say there's some countries that we really like, both from a geological and sort of operating environment perspective. Brazil's on that list. Chile's on that list. Argentina is, but there's not as many existing secondary royalties. Then there's sort of a secondary list, which would include places like Peru, Colombia as well. Yeah. Then there's sort of a no-fly list of the Venezuelas of the world and, I guess, some more of the more unstable parts of Latin America. I think the other dynamic that's at play is where can we find rational sellers. In Chile, for example, there's a lot of interesting copper royalties, but they're held by extremely wealthy families. These are not the types of individuals that are willing to give them up for $0.50 in the dollar.
Sometimes there is a fairly short conversation with some of those families. A respectful but short conversation. Yeah, we are actively looking to expand across Latin America, but within reason. We are not going to misprice risk to do it, and we are not going to sort of—yeah, we are not trying to goal-seek to get more exposure to LATAM. Bill?
What about wild west places like Africa and Indonesia and Malaysia, which all have lots of mining? What opportunities or lack thereof do you see there?
Yeah. I will start with Africa. We have a couple of royalties in South Africa. I guess we look at each country selectively. The reality is, depending on which commodity you are looking for, sometimes you need to go to Africa. If you are looking at copper or bauxite, some of these countries are the Saudi Arabia of their respective commodities.
Infrastructure and governance is obviously a bit more patchy. I'd say what we ultimately focus on—I'll give you an example. We bought a gold royalty in Nigeria for $500,000. Small investment, but we made five times our money within a space of three years. Ultimately, what gave us comfort around that investment, Bill, was the operator was a Canadian company listed in Vancouver. The royalty contract was governed by the court system of British Columbia. If anything went wrong with our investment, we'd be in Vancouver in court. We wouldn't be in Abuja or Nigeria or Lagos in Nigeria in court. Ultimately, we need to get comfortable not only with the mine but also what our protections are under the royalty contract.
If we can't get comfortable beyond any doubt that we're going to be paid and that we can secure and defend our investment, then we'll just pass on it. What I expect going forward is we'll continue to be approximately 70% weighted towards Australia and 10%-20% U.S.-Canada, which will allow us to look for, reach for, small ticket-sized investments in Africa that will, similar to that Nigerian example, give us really high alpha and high returns. I don't think we'll ever get overweight Africa. I can't expect that would happen.
On the index question, what's the time period of unstable funds shares in the United States?
My understanding is by Monday, the 30th of June, the index needs to have rebalanced.
Basically, between now and the 27th of June, we would need to be sort of—the index's weighting on us would need to have been acquired effectively. Now, this is a bit of a dark art. I've never been involved with index inclusion as management. The way that the FTSE Russell remeasures and rebalances their indices is they post a preliminary list, which we were successful on the 23rd of May being included in that. Then they have a two-week period where you can contest if you're about to be dropped out of the index, or you can argue, "I should have been added." We've just completed that two-week period. Now we are sort of definitively in. Typically, it's around this time you start to see the index funds start to accumulate stock.
But I put a big health warning on this to say that this is not my area of expertise, and I guess we'll let Mr. Market work out what happens over the next two weeks. Directionally, it should be very positive for liquidity.
Yeah. Spencer, I do want to be respectful of the yellow light.
You've got five seconds. Five seconds.
What about oil and gas royalties? There are lots of those, and they're very fragmented in places.
We're not petroleum experts, oil and gas experts like John is over there. Look, we stick to risks and value that we can price. We're a team of mining engineers and mining geologists. We can't price oil and gas risk. We will stick to what we can price.
The only remote circumstances where I could see us acquiring an oil and gas royalty would be if we bought a portfolio of mining royalties and, say, 99% of the value was in the mining royalties, and we got a few free additional oil and gas royalties. Other than that, it is not something we can price, so we will not take it on. Thanks. Yeah. Cool. Thanks for everyone's time. Feel free to grab me after if you want my card or if you want to have any follow-up questions. Thanks a lot.