Good afternoon. Next company that's presenting for you is Vox Royalty. It's a very unique, differentiated business. With us today, we've got the CEO who built this business, Kyle Floyd, and I will turn it over to you, Kyle.
Thank you, Steven, and again, thanks to the entire 3PART team. This is the best conference we go to every year, and I appreciate all your efforts for us. I will be making forward-looking statements, so I appreciate your attention to the disclaimer. For those that don't know Vox, I'm going to spend about half the time talking about what our business is about, why we exist, why I created this company, and then also spend half the time on some current events. We've acquired some really interesting royalties over the last few months, and I can shed some light on why we bought those assets and what they're going to mean to our business. Fundamentally, if I were in your shoes, I would ask, why does this company exist? I think there's a lot of businesses that don't have a great reason for existing.
They don't present an interesting return paradigm for potential shareholders. This business was designed to solve a problem that I viewed in the industry. In a prior life, I was an investment banker and saw from the inside out how challenging this business can be to invest in, also how challenging it can be to own and operate a mine. It became very, very clear to me that there was a medium for exposure within a certain asset class that could generate better risk-adjusted returns. Why do we exist as a business? Fundamentally, we believe we generate the best risk-adjusted returns for anybody that wants precious metals exposure and metals more broadly. Empirically, that's proven out over many, many years. Royalty companies have outperformed this as a function of royalties as an asset class themselves outperforming.
Royalties are able to give you a lot of the optionality and a lot of the plus-side exposure that you can get with owning mining companies with a lot less risk. That fundamentally drives the outperformance of this asset class. In creating this business, it came down to, as many would appreciate in this room, the ability to find these assets at dislocated values from their fundamentals and what we ultimately knew was a fair price around them. We've built a business that can systematically find these assets at dislocated values and compound that capital. A little bit of history on Vox. I started the company 12 years ago. It was more of an idea than it was a business at that point in time.
We had very patient shareholders, allowed us to build around the core principles of identifying these types of assets at dislocated values and building a competitive advantage to do that systematically in a way I would argue that nobody's done, but certainly not in a way that has been, I would say, addressed over the last decade. It's generated a very significant return for those founding investors. It's generated, I think, a very positive return for the investors that were with us since going public in May of 2020. I will tell you, even with those phenomenal returns dating back from our inception, the best days for our business are in front of us.
We have more capacity to scale at a better return profile with a better balance sheet and a lower cost of capital, a better team, better systems, and better processes to systematically find these assets and continue to build the portfolio. I talked about kind of some of the empirical reasons for why this business was built. I won't dwell on this chart, but what this chart highlights is that royalty companies outperform physical, and they vastly outperform the mining equities. We're in what might be a positive trend for the metals. I don't know how long it will last, but I can tell you capital is flowing back into the industry. There's a lot more interest in metals, especially precious metals right now. When I founded the company, I would argue 12 years ago that we've been in a bear market for mining companies ever since.
I think we might be on the other side of that. Time will tell. We don't need a bull market. That's one of the fundamental benefits of our business is we're finding royalties over mining projects that can operate at much lower metal prices than what we have today. We'll come into production and stay in production. Why do mining royalties outperform? It's giving you the optionality and the upside that occurs within mining companies without taking on so much of the risk. What are some of those big risks? Capital intensity. Our business can run for about $300,000 a year, and the revenue will grow.
You could buy a significant piece of Vox tomorrow, say, "Kyle, appreciate what you and your team do, but we just want to run out the portfolio that you have." It will grow in revenue, and you'll have to pay very, very little to have that occur and for those returns to come in. The other benefit is one of the big issues within mining is dilution. Its capital intensity creates almost an ongoing need for more capital, whether that's from debt or equity. Ultimately, a lot of it is equity, and a lot of it's diluted. Our royalties, royalty assets, are not diluted when they go raise debt or equity, and it's usually a priority payment. We're able to get the benefit of a constant pressure on these companies to grow and deliver ounces. A lot of times, the profitability of those ounces isn't that high.
For us, every additional ounce when they're extending reserves and increasing production is pure profit to us. Profitability and optionality for us is very significant with a lot of risk mitigation built in. Quick overview on the cap table. Something to note is we're majority precious metals. That being said, I'm not up here to profess being a gold bug to you. While gold might do very well, and it has done well to outperform the S&P for the last 20 years and the last 100 years, we buy predominantly gold royalties because that's where we have the most opportunity to find value. That being said, I think it's noteworthy that our portfolio does have a majority of precious metals. A majority of that exposure is in Australia, which I will tell you is by far and away the world's best mining market and the best place to own royalties.
We have phenomenal organic growth. That's royalties that we bought pre-production that we expect to come into production. We ultimately believe there's mid to high 20s of these assets that will ultimately be generating revenue for us over a three to four-year time horizon. The other thing that I would note is we have a fantastic balance sheet and I think a very good cap structure. There are no warrants. We have cash. We have a revolver with Bank of Montreal that gives us the ability to strike on new opportunities at a 6.8% cost of capital. You have a management team that owns a lot of stock with a board that owns a lot of stock and very aligned interests, as we always have been from our inception.
Our formula, I believe, at this point in the lifecycle of the business, is proving out to generate excess returns at a lot less risk. How do we do that, and what's the systematic approach to this? The starting point, as it would be for any business that you'd expect, is the people. Put me to the side. We have what I think is the best team in this industry. We might only go two inches wide, but we go a mile deep. I don't think there's anyone that has the depth of experience and understanding of these assets, how to value them, how to understand where they're going the way that our team does. Obviously, that is crucial to our success and our capabilities. The second thing that happens with the technical team is that we're monitoring developments worldwide.
It's essentially an event-driven catalyst approach to finding assets at dislocated values. We're looking for information that will tell us what are going to be the next assets brought into production by the major mining companies. The kind of third leg of the value creation stool for us is we have a proprietary database. We bought the world's largest proprietary database of mining royalties in 2019, started working with it in 2017. When our technical team has identified an event or a catalyst that is now crystallizing a timeline for an asset to come in production, and ultimately, when it does come into production, that it's going to be a quality operation, we then go into our database to see if there's a royalty over it, who owns it, and then we work on getting in touch with that party.
We bought royalties from the largest mining companies that they didn't know that they owned, to doctors and villages in West Africa, to hearing aid technology companies, to telecom businesses, to automotive parts businesses. We've had deals with construction businesses that had legacy mining operations. We find legacy royalties buried in all different kinds of places, a lot of these obscure to the rest of the world. When you combine those three prongs, it creates a systematic approach for us to find very, very deep value in a sector not necessarily known for buying value. Some of the returns, I guess, some of the highlights of our royalty portfolio, most assets that we're buying, we're focusing on a production timeline of about two to three years out. That's where we can find the best value arbitrage in our favor.
There's someone that typically needs liquidity that's been sitting on a royalty for decades and ultimately has a need for cash, and we're able to supply that need. We are the largest buyer in terms of volume of these assets of anybody in the world. We have a very good track record of doing what we say we're going to do. From a public-facing perspective, we're a party that owners of these royalties actually seek out to transact with. That's been very positive for our business. I highlight on the other side of the slide, we very much focus on returns and payback. Every year, we continue to validate this track record, and the returns crystallize as assets come into production, pay us back rapidly, and then have very long-duration mine lives on the other side of that payback.
In many ways, we're differentiated because of our approach, but we're also differentiated because of where we own royalties. For most in this room, if you've had any experience with mining, you've heard of all the horror stories of different jurisdictions in Africa, its expropriation, South America, same story, interesting taxes that come about without kind of normal rule of law principles applying. You name it, the risks abound in mining. Australia as a jurisdiction is the best place to be. Very consistent rule of law and appreciation for the mining industry fundamentally, the best people per capita, the most development per capita, and infrastructure that supports all of it very, very well. It creates both the best opportunity set to find value and optionality, and very importantly, the lowest risk jurisdiction to operate in as well.
We're finding not just better returns, we're doing it with a lot less risk. I mentioned that one of the legs of the value creation stool for us is the proprietary database. We bought this database in 2019. I'd worked with it as early as 2017 and then convinced the owners of this database that to be utilizing it in a competitive form on the proprietary or principal investing side of a business was going to be a lot more valuable than charging a fee on the way by for finding deals. That's proved to be very fruitful for those that sold us the business. They've joined us and ultimately increased our capability in finding and buying these assets at fantastic value. The other component that's happening at a macro level that's really wind at our back for our business is gold in U.S.
dollars is how most people talk about gold. The reality is on the ground in Australia, gold is trading at about $5,000 an ounce, which, as crazy as that number sounds in North American terms or U.S. dollars or even CAD dollars, that's how it sounds there. It's an unbelievable margin that Australian miners are now capturing. Their costs are in Aussie dollars, and they're getting revenue in U.S. dollars. That's created a really healthy margin and ecosystem there that exists and has existed for a while. We're able to capitalize on that. Where you start to see the results of that or its positive effects on our business is the amount of new assets coming online into production and then assets that we already have that are in production expanding production.
When I talked about our business providing optionality, we're looking at buying assets at $0.10, $0.20, $0.30 on the dollar for where they stand now. With further capital expenditure into those assets, mill expansions, increases in reserves and resources, you're seeing mine lives get extended and production increased, which at higher metal prices has this significantly compounding function that works in the benefit of the royalty company when we're not the ones paying for all of that growth. Just a quick snapshot of some financial highlights for us. We do pay a dividend. What you'll find with us is that our free cash flow growth is expected to grow at a much higher rate than our dividend payout. Our dividend has grown by about 6% over the last three years since it's been inaugurated. Our royalty revenue has very consistently grown as our producing asset count was growing.
Early days, we were finding assets that were anywhere from 5- 10 years out of production. When we started with just $7.5 million, that was how we were able to find value. It was riskier, and it was smaller ticket sizes, which really limited the opportunity set. Now you'll see that our business is at an inflection point. There's immense operating leverage, and our business is better positioned to capitalize on the growth opportunities in front of us while maintaining better, equal, if not better, returns. Along the way, you can take it with a grain of salt, but analysts have started valuing our portfolio as of 2020, and they've steadily moved up the price target as we've continued to realize significant returns across the portfolio. Some of the key takeaways on Vox: organic growth. What we already have is undervalued.
You'll consistently see new mines come online, mines that are already producing expand production. We've completed two really deeply accretive royalty acquisitions. Most recent was the Wylou North Iron Ore Royalty. We're really excited about that. Probably prefer to talk more about that in one-on-ones, but really, really deep value acquired there. Camman 2 is a producing copper royalty in South Australia. That was really neat. There's a lot of expansion potential around that royalty, and we got it at very deep value. As I mentioned, operating leverage right now with both the combination of what we call organic growth, what's already growing that we own in the portfolio that we don't have to pay anything for, alongside what is a really robust business development pipeline, we believe is going to lead to a dramatic expansion in our operating metrics.
Alongside that, we joined the Russell 2000 on June 30, which was a really nice achievement for our business. We've seen liquidity increase dramatically from that and also, to a certain degree, investor appetite and interest in Vox. In 2026, there's another major index for a business like ours, which is called the GDXJ. We believe we have potential to reach that index or be included in that index as well. We have a business that I believe has more wind in its back than it has ever in its history. It's a very, very good market for the miners as well, which further accelerates the growth of our business. With that, I will end prepared remarks and open up Q&A. Thank you. I did want to talk about the Wylou North Iron Ore Royalty acquisition.
If you have a question, feel free to raise your hand, and we can jump to that. We announced this transaction yesterday. What is really neat about this is it, I think, for everybody in the room that's wondering, what does that process look like in actuality? How do you find an asset that you think can generate a 20x return over the next two to three years? That sounds too good to be true. How do you do that? We picked up about two years ago that exploration spend on this mineral tenure in Australia for iron ore was ramping significantly. You can see that chart. I think that is in the bottom corner of the slide. In iron ore, that's an exceptional amount of capital to be spending on a project. The way the iron ore markets work is they're very cash flow oriented.
They're not going to spend money before they plan on bringing something into production unless it's going to be a very, very tight timeline. We picked that up. The other thing that we knew is that the plant that this would feed was running out of reserves, and ultimately, this ore source was likely to replace it. We had boots on the ground confirm the things that we were seeing to make sure that our eyes weren't deceiving us. Then coinciding with this, the junior company that held it was a $3 million market cap business, was really in need of capital, and we were able to provide cash to them at a time that it was very sensitive to their business.
With all those dimensions at play, we were able to find a really valuable royalty at a price that we feel was very good for our shareholders, meanwhile providing necessary liquidity to the counterparty that we worked with. The other royalty that was really exciting that we bought this year was a producing copper mine in South Australia. Why we really liked it, and usually where we're able to find deep value, is assets that are two to three years out from production. Once an asset reaches production, it's harder to find those dislocations in value consistently. With this operation going into production, there was again another group that needed liquidity that owned it, but the mill utilization was only running at about 40%.
We believe that mill utilization is going to go something closer to 60%- 80%, maybe even 90%, which automatically presents a huge optionality for us in terms of the revenue base for us could double. The other component to this that we really liked is that we expect the mine life, what stands now as probably five to six, five to seven years, we ultimately expect to go for a decade plus. When those two components came together, this became a very attractive deal for us to get done. We are the most voluminous buyer of these assets, our most active buyer of these assets in the world, and especially in Australia, we have a great reputation for doing what we say we're going to do, moving quickly and efficiently.
We get the benefit of that flywheel effect of, yes, we're watching for assets, but we also have a seller group that recognizes the value that we bring to the table for them and that we're a party that they can count on. That really helps us from a business development side continue to execute new great opportunities. OK, now we get into Q&A. Our expectation was in the next two to three years, and then we would achieve, we estimate about $10 million per year. Unfortunately, most of our royalties don't have caps. When this hits a certain production threshold, just full disclosure, it will stop paying us at that point. We will have received approximately $20 million at the point that that would happen. Value of the business. Yeah, so we're really excited about it. It's things like this.
I think we're pretty subdued when we press release new acquisitions for reasons that you would understand. Our business is always turning over opportunities like this. It's day in, day out that we do it, and it's very systematic. We're not kind of sitting on our hands waiting for someone to come to us with a royalty to buy. We're very much proactive in this ecosystem and spending the time to consistently get better and refine our capabilities to locate these assets and price these assets. I do believe that our team, again, separate me from it, I do believe we have the best team when it comes to this very narrow niche of assets and understanding them and creating value around them. Yes.
There are a couple of questions. I didn't understand your calculation of 6.8% cap rate. If you could go a little more into that. You know we've seen over the last few years a number of these royalty companies that have come up. You've done Gold Royal, Triple Flag, whatever. I understand your focus is narrowed to Australia, but can you still differentiate? Are you going up then even for these type of deals that you're doing? You're not going up against the direct kind of product.
I'll start with the first question. If I forget one of them, jump in. Our cost of capital, our cost of debt is 6.8%. We have a $25 million revolver with Bank of Montreal. That's helpful. We have about $6.7 million outstanding with them, and that can go up to $25 million. If we need capital for an acquisition, we have that revolver that we can use. Cost to equity, you could benchmark that somewhere.
You said cost of capital. What you meant was?
Cost of debt, yeah. The last transaction we've done has either been with cash or with debt. Cost to equity, CAPM would probably put you around a 10%- 11% cost of equity. Run the weighted average calculation from there. You mentioned other royalty companies being in existence. What was the question around them?
This is this sector. Don't invest in mining companies. No, invest in physical gold, invest in royalties. It seems to me that we still have maybe two or three. Now we have maybe 20 listed. We're all going after similar situations. I'm worried about crowding out and also being able to differentiate really what is it compared to the bandage, especially because yours is one of the smallest, but on the smaller side. I want to hear your argument beyond your geographical. I wasn't sure they're prepared .
Let me answer the first question first because it'll end up blurring together, and I'll have to come back to you on that. The market is actually hyper-competitive. There's another 15 publicly listed royalty companies. When I started the company, I think there was five. The reason for that is because this asset class has fundamentally vastly outperformed mining companies. I'm not here to tell you not to buy mining companies. I'm not here to tell you not to buy physical. I believe our business, and I can't speak to the other royalty companies, provides the best medium for the best risk-adjusted returns. That doesn't mean that you can't make money buying mining companies. There's certainly a lot of mining companies that have done exceedingly well. On average, the royalty companies have vastly outperformed, and it's created more competition.
Our business from day one was designed to avoid competition, to avoid competitive processes for scaling our portfolio, to be able to insulate ourselves from the competitive forces that have driven up valuations in our industry and driven up the prices paid by most of these competitors. Our average price, to put it in context, we put $50 million out from 2019 to 2024 to buy third-party royalties. We're already generating more than a 25% current return on that invested capital. Our industry, on average, is generating a 3% return on invested capital. You're right. There are other options in terms of mining royalty companies. We are not the only one, but we are the only one that approaches it in this fashion and has this track record of generating returns.
That's not to say that you shouldn't go own any of the other companies or assets that are linked to metals. I just believe that we have the best risk-adjusted returns if you're looking for that type of exposure.
On the proprietary database, that comparative advantage, is that a proprietary database that is static or is it dynamic?
It's dynamic. Both, you know, it doesn't, we estimate that it captures about 70% of the population of existing mining royalties out there. We're working, AI is actually helpful. We're not an AI company. Be very careful. I'm not trying to throw a buzzword out there to get picked up by the bots. We do use AI to help find blind spots in data sets that we couldn't process historically. On one hand, we're finding more royalties through some of our work to identify and address those blind spots. On the other hand, new royalties get created every day when mining assets change hands. It's not a static universe, but the database is one of the legs of the stool.
The team and the process are equally important with that, and it takes all three of those components to come together for us to systematically find the value that we do with this asset class.
The last question, since you started the company, yes, one of these royalties.
What do you mean by lapsed? We've had royalties that had a cap. Like we bought a royalty actually in Nigeria, of all places. It had a cap, and we paid $1 million, and it generated $5 million for us over 30 months. That's an example of a mine ending its production for us, but anticipated. In terms of mines that have been in production without caps, there are still resources. There's been a couple that have paid us back, then gone into care and maintenance, and we're expecting to come back online. Average mine life across the portfolio is 15- 20 years. Yes.
How is your track record during all that?
Yeah, I'm about 5%, and the rest of management takes us to, I think, close to 9% right now. There's the founding investor on the board, and yeah, he's another 8%. Very aligned. We built, you know, it was really a partnership with investors to create a business that could create and drive excess returns per unit of risk and continue to compound that cash flow. You're finding our business at, I think, the best position we've ever been in our history to address new opportunities that are in the market. Our organic growth is very significant, and what you'll see is that that gets now reflected with a lot of operating leverage within the operating metrics of the firm. Certainly come find me. I'm still, there might be some one-on-ones available, but I appreciate everyone's time. Thank you very much.