All right, everyone, welcome back. Next, we have Vox Royalty Corp, trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol VOXR, and on the TSX under the symbol VOXR. It's a returns-focused mining, royalty, and streaming company with a portfolio of over 80 assets spanning eight jurisdictions. Happy to welcome Chief Investment Officer Spencer Cole. Welcome to the conference today. We're looking forward to hearing the presentation.
Thanks so much for inviting us, Ana. We're excited to get into the presentation.
All right, the floor is yours.
Fantastic. As Ana mentioned, Vox is a precious metals-focused royalty and streaming company, dual-listed on NASDAQ and TSX. You're hearing about the Vox story and strategy at a really exciting time, both within our industry and within our company's sort of 10-year history. We find ourselves in a very constructive macroeconomic market, particularly for gold, and then also for other metals like copper. We're at record high gold and copper prices. There's a lot of geopolitical uncertainty, and we've seen a huge influx of interest and buying, particularly from U.S. generalist investors in gold and gold-related equities, so it's a perfect time to be looking at a royalty and streaming company such as Vox, and I'm excited to sort of unpack that and why we think we're the best way, particularly for generalist investors, to get leveraged exposure to metals within our industry.
I will be making some forward-looking statements, so I'd refer listeners to the disclaimer on our corporate presentation on the Vox website. Now, mining is a tough business, and it's tough to pick winners within the industry if you're not a mining engineer and a geologist. Empirically and historically, mining equities have historically underperformed all major equity indices from the S&P 500 to comparable indices around the world. So you've got this interest and demand from generalist investors who want exposure to commodities and metals, but it's really tough for them to pick the winners without the right sort of mining toolkit. Vox was essentially built to solve this problem back in 2014. The company was seeded with $7.5 million of generalist capital, which isn't much in the mining industry, obviously.
From day one in 2014, we were created by a group of investors to serve a generalist group of investors. Our North Star and our focus as a company from day one has been on compounding per-share returns and targeting some of the highest risk-adjusted returns in the entire mining and royalty industry. We've been able to deliver that over the last five years. That's through a number of key competitive advantages that we've built over the last 10 years that are really picking up in momentum as we continue to scale up the business in a really capital-efficient way. As Ana mentioned, we have over 80 assets in our portfolio. For investors who don't want single mine risk, we offer a large amount of portfolio diversification within just our existing asset portfolio.
And our team, we are a really passionate, dare I say it, team of mining nerds, mining engineers, and geologists on the front lines of the business who are meaningful investors ourselves. We have over 10% insider ownership, and we're excessively focused at finding forgotten value within this niche of mining royalties and streams. So if you look at historical returns across the commodity complex, there's been three key ways, I guess, to play commodities and metals. One is to hold the physical metal. Two is to buy the underlying mining companies. And three has been to invest in royalty companies such as Vox. Now, it's interesting when you look at the returns. Unfortunately, anyone that's historically weighted towards mining companies and mining operators and their equities, they've seen the lowest return out of those three distinct asset classes.
The next best return has been actually holding the underlying physical metal. So since over the last 20 years, gold has appreciated approximately 700%. But the best returning asset class within the commodity and mining complex has consistently been royalty companies and their equities. So when I talk about leveraged exposure to metals and leveraged exposure to commodities, royalty companies have delivered that consistently over the past 20 years. So these three examples on this slide, from Royal Gold up to Wheaton, these are the large cap royalty names that got appreciated from 800% up to 3,300%. So these are capital-light business models that perform extremely well both when metal prices are going up and even if metal prices are flat. So empirically, royalty companies have been the best way to get leveraged exposure to metals historically. Now, why is it that these royalty companies do outperform?
The key reasons for investors who are new to this space is that a royalty is typically just a percentage of revenue from a mine without any underlying exposure to capital costs and operating costs. So as a royalty company, even if there is operating cost inflation or capital cost inflation, we bear none of that exposure. So we don't experience any of the same dilution that junior explorers and developers typically sort of deliver for their investors as they're trying to explore and build mines. So we get pure top-line exposure linked to the revenue of the mine without any of that inflationary drag or share dilution. So those are the attributes that really stand out in these high-quality royalty companies. And that's typically why these royalty companies trade at a premium and typically outperform over the long term based on the historical benchmarking that I mentioned before.
Look, one interesting feature of our business model is we are focused on tier-one jurisdictions where mining is still a very sort of well-supported industry, and part of that extends or that strategy really sort of culminates in a jurisdiction like Western Australia, so of our 80 assets, approximately 55 of them are located in Australia, and specifically, Western Australia is one of our key markets, and what's interesting is most investors realize that the gold price is at a record level, but what they don't realize is underlying currencies have devalued relative to the U.S. currency, so the Aussie dollar has weakened, but at the same time, the gold price has strengthened, so for our 55 Aussie royalties, the mining companies selling gold in U.S. dollars, they've seen sort of record amounts of margin expansion, which means more free cash flow that they can reinvest in the ground.
And it ultimately means for us as a royalty holder, we're seeing more exploration, more development, and production expansions being brought forward to capitalize on this record margin expansion. Because the gold price in Australian dollars is over $ 6,000 an ounce. So we've been investing patiently and quietly in Western Australia and Australia generally exactly for markets such as these. So it's sort of a perfect storm of capital allocation where we're starting to see increasing momentum in our assets being brought online into production and ultimately expanded to the benefit of our royalty revenues. A little bit about our capital structure and our portfolio. So we're approximately a $360 million U.S. market cap. We're sitting on a net cash position. We have a credit facility of up to US$75 million , which is almost entirely undrawn.
Very strong balance sheet with potential to bolt on new accretive royalty opportunities. And then in terms of our shareholder base, we have some of the largest mining specialist investors such as BlackRock, U.S. Global, and a number of other European and North American funds. And then importantly, in June of this year, we were successful in being added to the Russell small-cap indices. So we've seen a lot of sort of index-based buying into the stock post that index inclusion in June. On the right-hand side of this slide, a little bit about our portfolio of assets. So we are 80% weighted towards precious metals, and the majority of that is gold. 20% of our portfolio is non-precious, which that's heavily weighted towards metals like copper. We've also got some iron ore, some zinc, and some nickel in there as well.
It's largely base metals in that non-precious bucket. And then, as I mentioned before, from a geographical perspective, we are heavily weighted towards Australia by design. We view Australia as the best mining jurisdiction globally. I'm obviously biased based on my accent, but in terms of a country and a jurisdiction that is pro-mining, where there's ample capital, skilled labor, and a supportive government that wants new mines built, we see all of those conditions maximized, particularly in Western Australia. So approximately 70% of our portfolio is weighted towards Australia. And then we have another 20-odd percent that's weighted towards Canada and the U.S. And then importantly, in terms of the number of assets in our portfolio that are producing today, we have, of our 80 assets, we've got 14 that are producing today.
Over the coming years, over the next sort of two to three years, we expect that to increase to close to 22 producing assets generating revenue. Look, we have, over the last 10 years, built some very deliberate competitive advantages, and they have allowed us to generate some of the highest returns in our entire $70 billion industry. It's essentially three parts of our sort of stool, three legs to the proverbial stool, if you will. One is a technically focused management team. So we're a team of mining engineers and geologists obsessively focused on identifying risk and value in the ground. So we do the hard work so that our non-mining generalist investors can put their head on the pillow at night knowing that we are focusing on very simple, low-risk mining ore bodies and mining operations.
The second one is we are sort of hawkishly tracking developments through a range of disparate information sources. So we're typically focusing on events and catalysts that might be tiny to the untrained eye. So something as simple as from a satellite image, we can see a drilling pad is being developed, or we can see a road is being developed that is essentially giving us a clue that construction is just about to commence on that property. And so we opportunistically seek to acquire royalties and streams on that property before the market realizes that this mining property is being fast-tracked into construction and production. That's how we consistently are able to find assets at compelling value.
Then, thirdly, over the last 10 years, we've developed the world's largest proprietary database of mining royalty contracts to find overlooked or sort of hidden value in contracts that were created anywhere from 20-40 years ago that cover mines that are just about to be built. So it's those three legs of the stool that allow us to generate superior risk-adjusted returns. Look, the proof is in the pudding, as they say. This is sort of a snapshot of the last sort of five years of what some of our returns have been. Up until the end of last year, we deployed approximately $50 million of capital into acquiring royalties. We've already been paid back $45 million of that. We've already been fully paid back on all the capital invested with significant mine lives in front of those assets.
On the left, you see some of the returns on capital we've generated. Between sort of 2x, 5x, up to 14x our money over the space of a matter of years. Very rapid payback on these investments. Investors can see that we're compounding capital at a very sort of rapid rate. The per-share sort of implied returns on that are very substantial. This slide just illustrates a little bit about our revenue growth over the last sort of five years. Keep in mind, this revenue is largely linked to the $50 million of capital invested up until the end of last year.
When you work those numbers through, generating $11 million on $50 million invested, and then this year our guidance is for $13-$15 million, it gives you an idea of what the return on capital is for our business and just how compelling those types of rates of return are. And while we've had sort of transformational growth in our revenue over the past five years, we're really optimistic and confident about what's in front of us. We have a number of key producing assets that are looking at expansions. And then also we have a number of new assets that are expected to come online in the coming quarters based on the operator's disclosure.
A really exciting point in the company's history where we have a really compelling portfolio of assets, and some of which are really only just stepping into their most productive years at the moment. This slide, I guess, touches on a few key sort of points. One is we do pay a dividend. It's actually the highest dividend yield in our entire $70 billion industry. But look, candidly, I would say people aren't buying us as a dividend stock. That's something that was important for our long-term investors. And we are an investor-centric company. So where a large portion of our investors wanted a dividend, given we had growing revenue and free cash flow, we were able to deliver that dividend over the last three years. And we've raised the dividend consistently year on year by approximately 10% for the last three years consecutively.
I touched on our growing revenue already, and then in terms of the five brokers that cover us, we continue to trade at a discount to the consensus price target that the street has on us, so yeah, a huge amount of growth. We're rewarding investors by returning capital. We do have an active buyback program as well, so we're very prudent allocators of capital. We're always looking for the best way to use each incremental dollar. I won't go into detail on this, but we have a huge amount of organic growth coming in front of us. One of our cornerstone assets is called Red Hill. That has very meaningful revenue potential, and the underlying project that that's linked to is going through a $1.5 billion expansion at the moment that's more than halfway completed.
We have some mines that are being restarted and some that are being expanded that have meaningful revenue attached to them, and then we have a host of new mines that are expected to be built and come online over the next two to three years based on their operator disclosure, and these are projects in Nevada, projects in Australia, some really tier-one jurisdictions operated by multi-billion dollar major mining companies. Look, in September of this year, we did announce our largest ever acquisition, and so it's worth just briefly touching on some of the features of that $60 million deal, so you'll recall up until the end of last year, in the company's history, we'd allocated $50 million of capital invested. We basically doubled that at the end of September through this large global gold portfolio acquisition, so for $60 million, we acquired 10 separate assets.
Eight of them were offtake streaming contracts, which allow us to receive approximately $1 billion of gold a year and effectively trade that metal. And then there were two royalty contracts as well. Over the 12 months prior to when we acquired the assets, they've been generating approximately $16 million of revenue. And so on a per-share basis, we were trading at the time about $0.20 revenue per share, and we were acquiring $1 per share of revenue. So highly accretive on all key sort of per-share metrics. Importantly, for investors today, we believe that that portfolio and the gold revenue that came with it has the strong potential to unlock additional index inclusion in March of next year. And that takes the form of the GDXJ Gold Index.
We'll wait and see how that plays out, but there's strong potential as we progress through January and February that we could be successful in being added to that index in March. Watch this space, but this transaction and the gold revenue attached to it was instrumental in terms of that index. Then in terms of the operators of these properties, some multi-billion dollar tier-one mining companies that operate these 10 assets. An incredible acquisition, truly transformational on all key metrics, and particularly on per-share metrics. A portfolio that, as we progress over the coming quarters, I think, and as the market starts to see some of the revenue attached to it, we would hazard some optimism that the market doesn't fully understand these assets until they start seeing the revenue generated. I mentioned we're heavily weighted towards Australia.
That portfolio really filled out our exposure to the Americas in a really complementary way, so it really did spread out our sort of geographic diversification from Australia to places such as Canada, U.S., and Brazil, so really complementary from a geopolitical perspective as well. I won't go through the detail on this, but from some of the maps, you can just see some of the countries I've referenced, and a number of these assets have very large ore bodies. That Blyvoor asset, just by way of example, they have over 20 million ounces of gold in the ground. So that ore body alone has potential to be producing well in excess of 30 years. With that, I want to leave some time for questions, so I'll take a breath, and I'll open the floor to any questions anyone has.
Great. Thank you, Spencer. Yes, can you talk about your current portfolio breakdown by commodity?
Yep, absolutely, Ana. So we're 80% precious metals, and of that, the overwhelming majority, almost all of that is gold. And then the other 20% is largely copper with a little bit of iron ore as well. So that's the current revenue mix. Going forward, a lot of our growth that's coming online is heavily weighted towards gold and then to a lesser extent, copper.
And how diversified is your revenue by asset, operator, and geography?
So we have 14 paying assets at the moment. So we have a lot of diversification. I think on a per-asset basis, it would be less than 25%. I don't think we've got any single asset that's over 25%. Everything's below 25% on a per-asset basis. So we deliberately construct the portfolio to have that sort of asset and operator diversification.
Then by country, as I mentioned, we're still very heavily weighted towards Australia. Australia has historically been in excess of 50% of our revenue, in some years up to sort of 90%. That's an exposure by country that we're very comfortable with, obviously.
If you can talk about the average remaining mine life of producing assets, what is it?
Yeah, the way we look at that is sort of on a weighted average basis. Currently, if you look at the producing assets in the portfolio, the mine life on a weighted average basis is somewhere between 8-12 years. The assets that we have coming online over the next two to three years, we have a number of assets that have anywhere from sort of 15-30-year potential or mine lives.
So we would expect that weighted average mine life over the coming two to three years to increase. My expectation would be somewhere between 10 to 15 years. So yeah, it's certainly moving in the right direction from that perspective.
And what type of agreements make up the portfolio? NSR, GSR, NPI, stream, offtake?
Yeah, so with this most recent deal we announced at the end of September, we do have, I guess, a large percentage of our portfolio weighted towards these offtake streams. So effectively trading gold and generating a margin on that. So we haven't provided revenue guidance for next year yet. We'll provide that in Q1. But there will be quite a substantial weighted to those offtake streaming contracts just because the gold price right now is obviously quite strong.
So yeah, my expectation is they will represent a very sort of, it's hard to put a percentage around it currently before we put out guidance, but they will be quite a meaningful percentage. And then the balance of the portfolio will be generated from royalties. And then within that royalty bucket, the majority of the royalties are sort of NSR, GRR, revenue-linked royalties. We do have some production-linked royalties. So one gold royalty that's linked to tonnages, but that's a sort of minority portion of the portfolio's revenue.
Perfect. And any royalties subject to buybacks or reductions by operators?
No, it's interesting. We have a few small exploration and development stage royalties in Canada that had some fractional buybacks. But because we weigh so heavily towards Australia, we see less buybacks in Australian royalty contracts compared to Canadian and American royalty contracts.
So I'd hazard, I guess, I haven't done this benchmarking, but I'd say we've probably got one of the lowest buyback percentages in our portfolio because of that Australian weighting. So yeah, there's none of our producing assets that are subject to buybacks and of our development sort of assets that are expected to come in online in the next two to three years. There's no buybacks that I'm aware of that are likely to be triggered over the next sort of two to three years on development or producing assets.
Okay, perfect. And who are the operators of your major cash-flowing assets? And what's their track record? Can you talk about them a little bit?
Yeah, absolutely. So we have about two-thirds of our portfolio is operated by mining companies that have market caps over two and a half billion.
Some of our largest operators in Australia are groups like Northern Star Resources, which is a $40 billion Australian gold producer, Australia's largest gold producer. They produce about 1.6-1.7 million ounces of gold a year. Very stellar track record. We have two iron ore royalties operated by a $5 billion company called Mineral Resources. They're one of the largest Australian iron ore producers. Another key counterparty for us is Zijin Mining. That's a sort of $100 billion company based out of Hong Kong. In North America, we have groups like Equinox Gold. We also have a number of other groups like Vault Minerals. These are multi-billion dollar companies that have built and expanded mines before.
So yeah, it's really having two-thirds of our portfolio that are over $2 billion in market cap, I think, is a bit of an anomaly for a company of our size.
Sure. And what is your process for monitoring operator performance and production reporting?
Yeah, so we've got a fairly well-established process. We get regular royalty statements. We'll obviously review and sort of reconcile those statements. Over 90%, over 95% of our operators are publicly traded. So we have regular public reporting, obviously. And then selectively, we do have audit rights. So selectively, we will audit certain statements at different times where we just need a bit of extra detail or where we need to put boots on the ground. So it's a fairly well sort of tested process.
Perfect. And how would you characterize the current market for acquiring royalties and mineral interests? Are you seeing more opportunities today than, say, a year ago?
Look, in gold, particularly, the market is hyper-competitive. There's a lot of people chasing producing gold royalties. But our business and in our DNA is to avoid competition. Everyone says that, but I think our returns speak for themselves. So the benefit we've had of essentially building the world's largest royalty database, and in some cases, it takes years to get sellers comfortable to sell royalties. So we're still able to carve out an uncompetitive niche in the industry. It just means we have to work quite hard to find those assets and cultivate the seller relationships. So if you're knocking on boardroom doors in Toronto, Vancouver, and Denver, it's hyper-competitive in gold right now.
If you're out in the bush dealing with salty prospectors, dealing with technology companies who've forgotten their own royalties, there is still a blue ocean in front of you. So that's the blue ocean that we've worked extremely hard to cultivate.
Yes, absolutely. And are there particular precious metals, properties where you're finding more attractive valuations or better acquisition economics than others?
Yeah, look, I think, not to overgeneralize, but Australia is still quite misunderstood from our perspective. And relative to, say, gold projects in Nevada that have had a lot of consistent access to capital, in Australia, we still see this dynamic where we can buy a royalty for $100,000-$300,000, and it covers a deposit that's sitting next to a big hungry processing plant.
And then the deposit can be fast-tracked and brought into production very quickly, sort of within two to four years, compared to in North America where it can take 10 to 15 years. So I'd say structurally, Western Australia is still mispriced from our perspective, and that's why we continue to focus on that market.
Perfect. Well, thank you so much for jumping on here, Spencer. We appreciate this time and presentation of yours and can't wait to follow you along in 2026. Happy New Year to you.
Happy New Year to you too, Ana. Thanks for your time.
All right, everyone. We'll be right back.