W e have for you is Vox Royalty, which is a uniquely positioned specialty mining business that was built for investors, by investors. To dive into that, I'll turn it over to Kyle Floyd, the Chief Executive Officer. Kyle?
All right. Thanks, Steven, and thanks to the three-part team. As always, a great conference and certainly one of our favorites to attend. Excited to be with you guys today. I think we have a very unique business, especially kind of with this cadre of companies here at the conference. We are essentially a gold royalty company. While we're not only focused on gold, gold is the primary commodity within our basket of royalties. With gold certainly being one of the flavors of the day and having an exceptional period of time in terms of price appreciation, our business has been designed to realize the best risk-adjusted returns for precious metals exposure. I founded the company almost 12 years ago. That was the mission. I can tell you we continue to deliver on that mission today.
We've had a lot of exciting developments in the business over the last few months and last few quarters, which I'll touch on. Ultimately, our business is designed to give you, the investor, exposure to precious metals with a much better return, with a lot less risk, and I'll unpack how that operates. In a prior career, I was on the investment banking side of the mining capital markets, and I saw all the ways that capital got poorly allocated and ultimately expected returns for investors tended not to be the realized returns. Albeit, over these cycles, gold has outperformed the S&P 500 over the last 100 years and over the last 20 years. If you just looked at mining companies, you wouldn't see that trend being overly correlated with their share prices.
I partnered with a group of investors to build a business that I believe could generate the best risk-adjusted exposure and have leverage to underlying precious metals. Alongside of me are five other professionals, mostly mining engineers and geologists. At the front lines of our business is a very technical team analyzing mining assets to figure out what are going to be the next mines that come into production, and then we try and buy the royalties or streams that already exist on those assets. If you look at the returns of our industry, I do not think I have a chart in this presentation on it, but the much larger royalty companies—so we are not the only mining royalty company that exists—there are much larger players: Franco-Nevada, Royal Gold, Wheaton Precious Metals. These businesses have dramatically outperformed the physical.
They've dramatically outperformed the mining companies and also the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ. These businesses are designed to be better risk-adjusted exposure, and over time, their equity prices and returns to shareholders have borne that out. Our business is designed to distill the best qualities of these bigger royalty companies, focus on those, and continue to compound capital successfully for our shareholders with less risk but more optionality. As I mentioned, gold, if you haven't been paying attention, gold has done very, very well. It was news to me when I heard this stat a couple of months ago that gold has indeed outperformed the S&P 500 over the last 20 and over the last 100 years. Our business is designed to capture that outperformance with a lot more volatility to the upside, a lot less volatility to the downside. That's why I named the company Vox.
It was a play on the VIX. I think you see this bearing out within our financials and within our performance over the last 12 years. Our founding shareholders are up over 1,300%. In the last year, we're up about 80%. I believe our best days are in front of this business. On the cap table, something I'd like to just highlight is management and the board owns a lot of the business. We are very aligned with our shareholders. When I wake up every morning, it's a focus on how do we build and maximize long-term shareholder value. We have a group of people that are aligned in that mission. Evidence of that is our costs have flatlined and even decreased over the last three years while the revenue has grown by almost 400%.
You put that in context of the rest of our industry, you tend to see costs run just as fast as you see revenue increase and ultimately never realizing that operating leverage for investors. Our business is very different, and you'll continue to see that operating leverage expand as our revenue profile is expected to increase significantly over the coming quarters and years. Also, we've partnered with a lot of very like-minded investors, very fundamental investors like BlackRock and their mining team, U.S. Global out of San Antonio, Pictet and Conway. Some of the foremost value-oriented investors in this industry have decided to partner with us as we continue to build a business that's focused on our shareholders and compounding value. I mentioned that we are predominantly gold. We are not agnostic, though.
We will buy royalties over base metals, iron ore, even battery metals if the right opportunity exists for us to buy at a dislocated value. Most of our portfolio is in Australia, which I will argue is by far and away the best mining market to have exposure to from the context of royalties or streams. You are finding us, again, at an inflection point in terms of operating leverage and producing asset count. We started with one producing asset back in 2020. We are now sitting at 14 producing assets that are generating revenue for our investors, and that is expected to grow to 22 over the next few years. Our sweet spot is buying royalties over projects that are anywhere from two to four years out from production.
Because we have been doing that and compounding that so successfully, you can expect that two to four projects come online every year that is going to be growing our revenue profile, growing our cash flow, and ultimately growing our earnings significantly as well. In September, we had a very transformational acquisition that we made. We raised about $60 million at the Bank of Montreal and Cantor Fitzgerald to buy a portfolio that over the last 12 months was generating about $15 million in free cash flow. Very accretive for us. We were trading about $0.20 in terms of revenue per share. We bought this portfolio at $1 of revenue per share, so highly accretive, basically 5x accretive for where we were trading to buy these assets. It was a seller that was motivated and assets that we uniquely understood.
It increased our producing asset count from 8- 14. You are finding a business, and one of the key foundations of why I believe we are an interesting investment opportunity for investors is that to buy a mining company that had 14 different producing assets and offered you that diversification, you are looking at one of the largest mining companies in the world. That would be something like a Barrick or a Newmont that are $10 billion-$30 billion enterprises. Vox is a $300 million market cap with 14 assets that are producing and essentially a fixed cost structure where we could run the business for about $2 million a year. Extremely resilient and extremely strong balance sheet. On a net debt basis, we are basically flat. We have about $11.7 million out in debt and about $11 million in cash, and our cash flow continues to grow.
It is a very resilient business. It is a diversified business, and we are realizing both exceptional revenue growth and exceptional cash flow growth. This is a snapshot of what we bought. Again, this portfolio was all gold. I maintain that we are agnostic. This was a gold-focused portfolio and a group of multi-billion dollar operators. We are buying royalties and cash flow streams over mines that have some of the best operators in the world in terms of their mining performance and execution around these assets, which, again, with 14 producing assets, mostly with multi-billion dollar mining companies, there is an inherent resilience to our business through that diversification and quality operator that sometimes I think the market misses on Vox. Again, a highlight on what we bought. We are seeing growing production across this cadre of assets.
With these operators, we've generally been surprised at the upside in what we bought in terms of what we're realizing from a revenue expectation standpoint. I mentioned that our business was designed to create the best risk-adjusted returns in our industry. This is a snapshot of some of the returns that we've been able to generate to date. You'll see a lot more success stories coming on this slide over the coming quarters and years. We continue to find assets that are generating excess returns for our investors and with a lot less risk. We're targeting assets where we have immense margin of safety and getting the optionality of the success that can happen to underlying mining assets through reserve increases, production increases, and all of that can be compounded by a higher metal price.
On the vintage of capital that we've outlaid to buy existing royalties and streams in 2019 to 2024, we'll be paid back very shortly on that, about a six-year cycle of payback. That's only only eight of those assets are producing from that portfolio that we've acquired. There's another 60 that have the potential to reach production with about 35 of those that we feel very confident in. We'll get very quick payback, but very long life optionality. We have north of $1.2 billion of metal that would be to our account that's in the ground that is available for mining companies to go out and mine. Ultimately, that gives you kind of an idea of what's present within the portfolio on a conservative basis, and that presents optionality to us.
We're trading nowhere near that value of the metal that's in the ground today. That inventory of metal is growing as these mining companies pay hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, to increase their reserves across the board. Here is a snapshot of where we've been as a business. I mentioned in 2020, we had one producing asset. We now sit at 14 producing assets. We're expecting two to four to maybe even five assets coming online every single year as royalties that we bought pre-production ultimately come into production. That's one of the ways that we're able to find excess returns is we have our team of mining engineers and geologists looking for the next best mines that are going to come into production, and we're buying those at very discounted valuations around what would be a typical market expectation.
That's not a guarantee that these assets will ultimately ever produce. We're looking for groups that need liquidity that are willing to give us these royalties. We hold them for a few years, and then we have insight that we ultimately expect that these assets will come into production. That's allowing us to compound capital at much higher rates of return than any other business in our industry. This slide, I think, does a good job of highlighting the embedded growth that we expect to realize within the portfolio. Again, that's what we own today. That's not going to count the accretive acquisitions that we're going to be making with very heavy cash flow over the coming quarters and years. We do pay a dividend. While it looks modest, it is the highest dividend yield in the precious metals royalty industry.
The function of that is that we are compounding cash at higher returns than the rest of the industry. Our ability to pay a dividend is significantly better. When we inaugurated the dividend three years ago, we said, "When we do it, it'll be meaningful, sustainable, and capable of growing." I think we've demonstrated that. We'll continue to be pragmatic around dividend growth. As you can see, revenue growth continues to increase significantly. We're expecting another big bump over the coming quarters and years as we ignore the benefit of the portfolio that we just acquired at great value. The operating leverage in the firm, I would say our business has probably been perceived to be a little bit more complex than it actually is for a lot of the passive capital that's out there just doing their normal screens.
Now you're going to see that operating leverage showcase itself, and I think that's going to make Vox attractive to a much wider group of investors than we have been historically. One thing to note about us from the analyst perspective, we have four analysts covering us. They don't value all of our assets. We have 80 royalties and streams in the portfolio now. I think the analyst that values the most of our assets only goes up to about 31, while 35-40 of our projects actually have engineering and economic studies around them. What happens is, as Vox continues to demonstrate growth and as assets get closer to production, the analysts tend to, almost on a little bit of a delayed basis, increase their price targets on Vox and increase their expected valuation of the business.
You see this kind of very consistent cadence on this chart on the right in terms of analysts increasing estimates around our business. To put a general summary of what exists within Vox right now and how you could think about the revenue profile of the business, we're looking at significant what we call gold equivalent ounces. One royalty alone on what we believe is a very conservative basis has about 30,000 gold equivalent ounces attached to it. Today, at today's metal prices, around $4,000 an ounce, that would be $120 million to Vox alone. This group of restart and expansions, again, these are relatively de-risked projects. They would have a high probability of ultimately entering production and paying Vox. Again, that's about $500 million at today's metal prices.
There is another group of greenfields development projects with some of the most successful mining companies around the world: Orla Mining's growing and producer in the Americas, Libby's operated by Hecla, which is a very big silver producer out of Idaho, and then some other Australian producers. When you add up these types of revenues that could be attributed to ounces in the ground, that's just with a very small cadre of assets in the portfolio, and it shows some of the upside that we have in our business. One thing I'll note before I get into Q&A, our business is unique in that if you buy into Vox with our 80+ streams and royalties, you're getting the benefit of billions of dollars being spent every year by the operators of these mines. We're not putting any dollars into these assets.
We're just getting a percent of the revenue that they produce. This slide is indicative of what a cycle looks like for Vox, where mines are investing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars in these assets. Two to three years later, they come online. These assets are now paying Vox very significant revenue. Interestingly, with mining and what I think will be very apparent to everybody in this room, it's a very cost-intensive business, as all extractive industries are. The benefit for Vox is that we are not afflicted by their cost structure.
As cost inflation, which I believe will be very significant over the coming years for mining companies, increases prices for mining and ultimately will increase the prices for metals, we do not bear that exposure, but we certainly get the benefit of higher metal prices and the ability to keep our operating margins and our operating costs very, so operating margins very high and operating costs very lean, where the industry, being so intensive in terms of power, labor, etc., has high fixed and high variable cost structures, where Vox has very limited fixed costs, and the only variable costs are associated with growing the portfolio. I think it makes our business more resilient, makes us more a much riskier type of business to be invested in. You compound that with a company that is seeing operating margins expand, revenue expand.
On the horizon, we were added to the Russell 2000. This was back in June. We expect to be added to the GDXJ, which is the largest index for a gold-oriented business like us. That should happen in March. There is potential also to be added to the TSX S&P 500 mining index on the heels of that. You are finding us at a time where I think you are going to see operating leverage expand significantly, our profitability metrics expand significantly, and that could potentially compound it around additional index inclusion and what I would expect is more broad-based investor interest. With that, I will turn it over to any questions. Yes, sir.
Whether they know or feel that social paying buying of gold and the Rockwood crowd buying less Bitcoin and more gold is what's really driven the price of gold, which you may or may not agree. That's part of the question. A lot of your business is driven gold. It's at $800 someday, but you know it dropped down to 200. That's the questions people are asking.
Sure. Be interested. I'm probably not the person to ask for a price forecast on gold. We base our business around backwardation or lower metal prices. Most of the industry ends up being dominated by the gold bugs. Look, gold has outperformed over a very long cycle. What I think can give you confidence in our business, and when we're looking to buy gold-related royalties or streams, we're actually forecasting a decline in metal prices.
If gold does what I think is logical and makes sense, which is increase over time with currency debasement, we're positioned to in order the benefits of that optionality and those outcomes. If gold does detract, you could see mining companies lose an exceptional amount of their value because of their fixed cost infrastructure, where Vox will be far more resilient. Our revenue profile, even with a big shock to gold price, should continue to increase significantly, where a gold mining company is likely to see a revenue profile decrease. Our business is built to be more resilient, almost no matter what the metal price environment is.
Your dean said gold will be at $10,000 an ounce in five years. Look, I hope he's right. I'll tell you, I'm not investing your capital on the basis that gold is going to be at $10,000.
Yes, I'll come back to you. Yes.
We know on the transformation of mining and the two other tech use. Million or have it generated 60 in the past 12 months. I'm just wondering, is there competition around that to get those assets? Also, in general, how do you get to the table and source overall?
Yeah, I probably focus more on this transformational acquisition that we made in September more than just what is the base Vox business. Historically, this is the first time we've actually—there was a small process run around these assets where we were uniquely positioned to be able to understand them and buy them quickly, where most of the market was going to need more time to kind of process and understand them. There was a very good relationship with the seller.
That was kind of—it was a perfect storm working in our favor where to date, we have not bought a royalty in a competitive process. The reason why is on the front lines of our business is a team of mining engineers and geologists. What they're doing every day is they're scanning the world for interesting developments on mining assets to figure out what are going to be the next assets that come into production. We're looking at data sets the rest of the world is not paying any attention to. The second thing that happens is we bought the world's largest proprietary database of mining royalties in 2019. Since then, interestingly, we've bought more mining royalties than anybody else in the world in one-off transactions with a very eclectic group of sellers.
Our ability to, one, locate is there a royalty through our database over a project that most of our competition is blind to is very significant, but just as significant is that we are scanning data with a technical team to understand what are going to be the next assets that come online, and then we're finding the groups that own these royalties. Some do not know they even own the royalties when we approach them. There are some people that tell us to bugger off and get lost. I'm never selling my royalty. There are some that say, "You know what?
You're finding us at a really good time because we have a liquidity need, and we serve that liquidity need in terms of giving them cash for this asset. A lot of times, these assets have been sitting on the shelf for 20, 30 years, sometimes even longer. The group that is ready to risk cash wins, want to take the risk that ultimately doesn't come into production ever or in the next couple of years. Yes. For buying your data and Vox, that goes alone. Yes. Yep. We bought that for $2.1 million in 2019. At the time, it felt like the most expensive deal that we had ever done because we weren't actually buying royalties. We were just buying the capability to buy royalties better. It turns out it's been the best acquisition we've ever made. Sorry, right here, and then—
Quick follow-up on that. This new deal emerged with a lot of your formula to that database?
No. This new deal that we bought was the only time that there was a small process run around these. Again, bought at great value. There was a relationship. There was an understanding. We were able to bring all of these assets and all the cash flow in tax-free, which was very unique because of a subsidiary and an operational capability that we had that was unique in the marketplace. Mr. Bid?
When you made the royalty acquisitions a couple of years ago, obviously, the gold was considerably lower. Yes. The compounds were typically lower Your returns as I see it's coming online now, obviously, by the fact that—so given that they've run in the buying prices that you've had, when you're evaluating new gold purchases, what kind of pricing are you using in your economic evaluation of what you would want to pay for those royalties?
Yeah. Yeah, good question. What you'll find about our business is I will tell you we can triangulate and find dislocations in value almost regardless of what's happening in terms of the underlying metal price. The common logic would be higher metal prices means you're paying a lot more for the gold exposure that you're generating. Now, look, certainly, metal price has gone from $2,000 in that gold has gone from $2,000 an ounce to over $4,000 an ounce over the last couple of years.
What I would tell you is generally, we're buying assets between 0.1 and 0.4x the NPV of an economic study around these assets. It tends to be less—the seller tends to be less fixated on gold price and much more fixated on development risk. What are the odds that this mine actually ever produces revenue to me as the royalty holder versus is gold at $2,000 or is gold at $4,000? The economic swing there is whether this mine is actually going to ever come into production more so or the valuation in the mind of the seller is more tied to is it going to come into production or is it not. There are risk factors in all of these mines that they might not come into production. We don't bat a thousand percent. We've certainly missed on some that have taken longer.
Not necessarily that they're not going to come into production, but they take longer. That tends to be more of the conversation. It's not as much about is gold at $4,000 or $3,500 or $5,000 an ounce. It's more on how are you pricing the expectation that this actually comes into production. Now, if we were in the market of financing mining companies, which is another part of our industry, which a lot of companies, royalty instrument companies, do, you better believe they're having conversations around like, "Are we pricing gold at $4,000? Are we pricing gold at $3,700 an ounce?" Those prices have traded up for sure. Yes, there's probably been some marginal creep in our pricing, but not very much. Certainly not reflective of the overall aggregate increase in gold price.
It much more comes down to our ability to find the next assets that are going to come into production and pricing those at very significant discounts around an implied perception around the risk of it ultimately entering production and paying.
You mentioned it's amazing the database that you bought back in 2019 that you determined the gold mining as well as the royalty.
Yeah, one of the more interesting things. Yeah, we pay. We have an outsource. We are not an AI company. I'm not trying to put buzzwords in a transcript. We're not an AI company, but we do use AI in some ways. OCR and visual recognition is much improved.
When we first bought the database, it was really our ability to take physical hardcopy data, translate that into digital data, and then screen for references to royalties and contracts all around the world. There was a lot of data that was just not—you were not able to visually—the systems were not able to recognize the keywords that we would need to search. We have been able to take some of the hardcopy data that existed decades ago and actually be able to capture references and find royalties that we did not know about. Every year, we are increasing the size of the royalty database. Again, it is a very important part of the business, but I would say equally as important is our capability and understanding development curves and catalysts around that where we are finding information that helps inform what good asset acquisition looks like. Yes.
Sorry, my question is to try to understand what kind of risk you're pricing. Is it more of a potential for development of what that actually entails? Companies include the reserves. It sounds like with technical team, it's more reserves perhaps than the—
Look, when I think about our business, I think the fundamental risk is less about whether the reserves are going to be there. It's more about the mine actually entering production because we're buying assets on average for one to two times forward revenue on mine lives that can be 10-20 years on average. The crystallization of value for us is when the mine enters production. Now, we're buying assets with a very significant margin of safety. Even if it takes a few years longer than we expected on a net present value basis, we're still very much in the black.
That is where the risk is. It's not like when we've looked at assets, we feel very good about the resource statement or the reserve statement. We've typically seen something that indicates it's usually a very large multi-billion dollar mining company that's progressing this asset into production. We've got granular data that this is going to be a solid mine if it enters production. The risk is that something jumps it in the production curve. They do all the things that make it look like it's going to go into production. We have information that the rest of the market isn't necessarily privy to. All of a sudden, something comes along. They make an acquisition. They find an asset. They deprioritize what we thought was going to come into production sooner.
That is one of the key risks of our business. If we expect something to come into production in two or three years, something supersedes it. A mine plan ultimately takes six or seven years. We have priced it at a margin of safety that we are still going to make money. Obviously, that would be a setback from our standpoint. Again, that happens very rarely. Our hit rate on what we are buying and ultimately entering production is very, very high. Over here, and then come back over there. Yes, sir.
Does silver enter into the equation currently or perhaps even in the future?
Yeah. We have one of the more interesting silver royalties in the world. It is over a project called Bowden's, and it is the largest developing silver project in all of Australia. We have about a 1% royalty over that project. We bought that royalty for $1 million four or five years ago. When it enters production, it could do $3 million-plus a year for 20-plus years. A lot of the mines, what's interesting about silver, silver runs with gold even if it's not assayed. Almost all of the gold mines get some benefit from a silver byproduct. It's what makes valuing silver and the forward curve so interesting around it is that silver is generally a byproduct. A lot of the mining companies, even if they're what you would view as a gold company, are benefiting from a higher silver price right now. We certainly have those royalties in the portfolio that'll benefit from that as well. Terrific. Thank you, everybody. Absolute pleasure to be with you.