Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. My name is Patrick Drouin and I'm the Senior Vice President for Wheaton Precious Metals. I'm joined today by Randy Smallwood, our President and CEO, who will be walking you through the investment thesis for Wheaton Precious Metals. I would like to bring to your attention that we will be making forward-looking statements on this call, and I would urge you to understand the risk associated with these statements. You can find a thorough description of those risk factors at the end of this presentation. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Randy Smallwood, our President and Chief Executive Officer.
Thank you, Patrick, thank you, everyone, for having a listen. These are challenging times, as you can imagine. I'd much prefer to be doing this face-to-face and meeting with all of you, but this will have to do for now. This is a tough time with the impacts of COVID-19 and this pandemic around the world. Just as an update from a Wheaton Precious Metals perspective, of course, our health and safety of our own employees and the communities where we get our metal from is a top priority for us. Our offices have been closed now for two weeks, and all of our employees are telecommuting. However, we've had good, strong business continuity plans in place, and so we've had, I would say, a relatively seamless transition and definitely an uninterrupted flow of our business. The company is in great shape.
We've got ample liquidity and capacity in terms of going forward and very, very strong cash flows coming over the course of this year. Obviously, partner operations are something that we are monitoring on a very regular basis. Daily, we get updates from our partners. To date, we haven't seen any issues. Again, we've had a few of the smaller mines go into standby mode. With 88% of our production coming from mines in the first half of their respective cost curves, we do feel that our partners are going to be very incentivized to do whatever they can to keep those operations running.
They are the most profitable assets in their own portfolios. These are the times when high quality really shines through, and I think we'll see that with our own portfolio in terms of how it performs over the while. I do hope that everyone is staying safe and healthy and our company is fortunate, and I think that in times like this, we as a company, we as human beings, have to think about the impacts around us and the impacts to our neighbors and communities around us. I urge everyone to consider what kind of capacity they have for charity, because there will be a need for it in terms of coming through this pandemic as well as we can.
I know we will get through this, and I know that in the end, we'll be a stronger community, a stronger company, a stronger planet because of this, but it's going to take everyone taking their time to do that. Please, do whatever you can to help those most that need. Who is Wheaton Precious Metals? We started the Streaming model back in 2004, and our vision at that time was to build this to become the world's premier precious metals investment option. Our mandate, of course, is to deliver that value through the Streaming model. We think it's a very good, strong business model that delivers low risk, high value back to our stakeholders. Our stakeholders are multiple. Of course, our shareholders, that's who I work directly for, and that's who our team works directly for.
It's important that we focus on low risk, high quality assets to deliver that profitable precious metals production back to our shareholders on a regular basis. To our partners, of course, we supply capital to the mining industry, but we do more than supply capital. We look at our agreements as partnerships where we try and find ways to continue delivering value through strong support of CSR programs and community programs around the mines that deliver us metal, et cetera. Of course, that is our neighbors. It's the people around our mines. It's the people around our offices. We as human beings, have a responsibility to try and deliver sustainable benefits to everything that we do in this world, and it's something that we take very, very seriously here at Wheaton Precious Metals. I mentioned the Streaming model on slide six now.
The Streaming model, of course, delivers a lot of benefits to our shareholders and at the same time reduces risks to our shareholders. Of course, you get strong commodity price leverage. We deliver exploration upside, expansion potential. We've also got optionality, a number of projects that aren't part of our current production pipeline that could deliver close to 250,000 gold equivalent ounces in annual production if they ever or when they come to fruition. On the risk side, we have very predictable costs, which is something that's unique from a resource perspective. We have a good, strong, sustainable dividend because of those predictable costs that always gives us a healthy operating margins, and so a very strong, sustainable dividend back to our shareholders. I would argue the highest quality asset base. All of this is built on highest quality asset base in the entire Precious Metals industry.
Not just the Streaming industry, the entire Precious Metals industry. We have 20 different mines delivering us metal, and 88%, sorry 87% of that production comes from the bottom half of the respective cost curves. This is the highest quality, highest margin assets, not only for us, but for our partners. We provide investors with upside associated with mining companies, but with the risk profile that is comparable to owning bullion or ETFs. There's so much more benefits than bullion or ETFs, though. I mentioned the high-quality asset base. Slide seven highlights the portfolio of assets. There's 20 different mines delivering us metal to date and another nine development projects. You can see there's a real strong Americas focus. It's really Americas and Europe.
We have looked around the world, and we're not ruling out other opportunities, but there has been, with our silver history, Mexico and Peru were very important countries for us. Of course, Brazil and Canada and other jurisdictions have now become much more important. What I like to highlight in this slide, though, is the partner list on the side. Streaming works as a source of capital for everyone in the mining industry, from the largest diversified mining companies in the world to the smallest. This is a competitive source of capital in terms of helping to build companies and to build projects on a go-forward basis. The partners the scale of Vale and Glencore, Newmont, all the way down to partners the scale of Alexco and Gold X Mining. Really, a well-diversified portfolio of assets, very low political risk when you look at these jurisdictions.
If there's a slide that highlights what I think makes Wheaton Precious Metals unique relative to even amongst its peers, it is slide number eight. This slide shows, first off, the quality of the assets, but then also the mine life of our assets. As I've mentioned several times, 88% of our production does come from the first quartile from the bottom half of the respective cost curves. It's important to keep in mind that most of our precious metals production does come from the base metal space, from copper mines and lead zinc mines, and even from nickel mines. We get strong gold production, strong silver production from all of these assets on a go-forward basis. Out of that 88%, 73% is the first quartile.
This is a reflection of how much profit our partners are making from these mines, not how much profit we're making. All of our costs are fixed and controlled and scalable. These really highlight the strength of the quality of the assets that we have. On the other half of this slide, the mine life. We have 33 years of reserves and another 33 years of resources on top of that. Over 60 years of reserves and resources backing this high-quality portfolio, this high-margin portfolio. A good, strong portfolio, I would argue one of the best, if not the best in the Precious Metals industry. With respect to our production profile, you can see last year we exceeded our production guidance of 690,000 gold equivalent ounces. We actually produced 707,000 gold equivalent ounces.
Our guidance for 2020 remains unchanged as of today, 685,000 oz- 725,000 oz of prozduction. We can see that's going to wind up averaging or climbing over the next five years to average 750,000 oz per year over that period. Now, as I say today, it is important to note that these are volatile times right now, a very fluid environment. To date, even with a couple of mines put on standby, they're small enough in terms of their influence that we still feel comfortable with our current forecast, our current production guidance for the year. I urge everyone to stay tuned on that. This is a very fluid environment right now, and we wait and see how that moves forward. Good, strong production, as you can see, dominated by gold. Gold is going to generate about 53% of our revenue over the next five years.
Silver will be about 40% of the revenue, and palladium and cobalt, to a lesser extent, 5% and 2%. Definitely a gold-focused company. The next slide here shows the beauty of the Streaming model in terms of the cost risk that you might actually have. The gold price itself, we've got fixed costs on a per-ounce basis going forward. Even on silver prices, you can see the healthy margins that we have. The beauty of the Streaming model is the fact that our costs are predictable. They're defined by our contracts, and they are predictable on a go-forward basis. When we see commodity prices climb substantially, just about all of that increase is delivered right back to us and to our shareholders. It's a good, strong business model with very healthy operating margins.
That, of course, has given us a very strong balance sheet. Slide 11 highlights the fact that we've got over CAD 1 billion in capacity on our CAD 2 billion revolver. We have, this is all as of December 31st, 2019, and we have healthy cash on hand. We are generating, this year should be close to CAD 700 million, CAD 675 million at current commodity prices in cash flow this year. So again, should continue to chew down that debt unless we see opportunities, and we have seen opportunities. We are active on that front. We've seen plenty of action. Some exciting opportunities had presented themselves ahead of this pandemic, this breakthrough, so we are still working on the corporate development front. As you can see, we have plenty of capacity to put those dollars back into the ground.
In fact, if you climb up to a price that I don't think is unreasonable in today's world, you can see how much of an impact it has on our cash flows over the next five years. Good, strong balance sheet. Our focus is on trying to put those dollars back into the ground, looking for the right reasons or right opportunities. Slide 12 again reinforces the benefits of this. We go back to the last financial crisis that we had back in 2010, 2011, 2012, the 2008, and 2009, and the aftereffects of that, we saw commodity prices, gold specifically, and silver prices jump substantially. You can see the extra CAD 2 billion in cash flow that we generated over that period of time, over and above what we were expecting.
What I'd like to highlight now is that we're producing more than twice the metal that we were back in those years. I know that with a 60+ year reserve and resource mine life in front of us, we will see a few more of these bumps. In fact, I think we may be starting one. Very well-positioned to reap benefits for us and our shareholders. We do have a very unique and sustainable dividend policy. Our dividend is based on, we have a basement that's defined by 30% of our cash flow. We did just increase it here earlier this year from CAD 0.09 a share to CAD 0.10 a share. It's about an 11% bump. That will form the basement for this year.
If we see continued increases in commodity prices and with our production growth, that will deliver back some additional value over time. We do see a good, strong dividend policy, and good potential for it to continue improving up. Let me go over the benefits to partner mining companies. Why would mining companies consider coming into a Streaming Agreement? Really, slide 15 lists off a number of different reasons, but I think the most important aspects are the second and the third one on this list, which is the initial value creation and the improvement to project internal rate of return, the return on invested capital. You can see how we compare relative to debt. We deliver so much more back versus debt. If you go to slide 16, the top half of slide 16 shows the arbitrage in value.
When we take precious metals and bring them into our company, it's worth more. So we see that strong arbitrage in value, and we share that with our partners on a go-forward basis. The bottom half of this slide highlights the benefits of internal rate of return. We supplied 78% of the capital to build the first two phases of Salobo. We only take away about 16% of the mine revenue. There was a total of CAD 4 billion spent on that project. The total net CapEx that Vale spent on the project was about CAD 860 million, which you can imagine their EBITDA in 2018 was CAD 882 million from this asset, their share of the profit. A very excellent example of why Streaming can take a good mine and make it a great mine.
Benefits to the community, as I mentioned earlier on, CSR and sustainability and social license is something that we have long believed in. Back from my own operating background when I've built and run a few different gold operations, I know how important this is. One of the things that we have is a good, strong focus on sustainability through our own due diligence process where it is an aspect that we look at and see if there's ways that first off, that our partners are satisfying minimum criteria, but also if there's ways we can help them improve. We have community investment programs. We have got strong policies and practices in place. Of course, a real strong focus on making sure that we even personally spend time giving back to what we have around us.
The community investment program that we have is focused on four pillars, health, education, environment, and community. What we do is 1.5% of our average net income gets invested back into the ground. About 0.5% Of that, so 1/3 of that goes to local CSR around our offices, where our employees, our own Wheaton employees live and work. The other 1%, 2/3 of it actually gets put into the mining communities around the sites where we get our metal from. This is a way of not only helping us be more successful, but more importantly, helping our partners be more successful and maintain stronger social license. It's the right thing to do, and it helps us overall do much better from that perspective. Of course, this has led to some top ESG ratings, and we did in 2019 made some commitments.
We signed on, one of the signing members of the World Gold Council's Responsible Gold Mining Principles, and we're the first Streaming company to join the UN and commit to the UN Global Compact. This is something that we feel even holds us to a little bit of a higher standard, and we're very focused on doing our best on that front. It is the right thing to do. It's what we as an industry need to do to improve our own performance. Why invest into Wheaton Precious Metals? You can see on slide 22 a number of different reasons as we compare. I think it's clear what we deliver in preference to bullion and ETFs, and so much to the traditional Precious Metal Mining industry.
I'd like to focus on the other streamers and why we feel Wheaton is the best way to invest into precious metals and the best of the streamers to supply that. On slide 23, it highlights our revenues. In 2019, we are 100% Precious Metals revenue. When you invest into Wheaton, it is an investment into precious metals, not other stuff, not oil and gas, not base metals. We are focused on precious metals. We are 100% Precious Metals revenue for 2019 and in 2020. We do trade at a discount to our peers. As you can see on slide 24, typical market metrics that we look at comparisons, you can see that we are trading at a discount across the panel here to our peers. PNAV is a number that I really focus on and think that it's an important number from a comparative perspective.
You can see that we've got some room for improvement in terms of catching up to our peer group. In fact, if you look on slide 25, you can see that the average upside, if we traded comparable to our peers, would be around CAD 2 billion. That's just taking the average of these very normal market metrics and saying that if we traded similar to our peer group, we would fit in. Still plenty of upside. The conclusion, we currently are trading at a very compelling valuation relative to our peers. We do consistently deliver relative to gold and silver. With respect to bullion and other forms of investing into this space, you can see how we have out-delivered on many different time horizons. Multiple year return comparison is much stronger, as shown on slide 26.
What we've accomplished as of December 31st, as of the end of last year, it was our 15th year. We started this company in 2004, and since then, we have invested CAD 9 billion into streams. We've already seen CAD 6.6 billion in cash flow generated back. When you consider the reserves and resources that we have in front of us, we still have plenty to deliver back to our shareholders. In fact, we've been doing that through the dividend. We only started the dividend about seven years ago, and we've already paid over CAD 1 billion out in dividends. Our cash flow is currently at about CAD 635 million, expected at current commodity prices. This is a volatile market, so stay tuned in terms of where we go on that. I am bullish on where we see commodity prices, especially Precious Metal prices going.
Stay tuned on that. As I mentioned, a very good, strong reserve and resource life. In fact, if you look at this portfolio today, this has delivered around 18% average annualized after-tax return from our portfolio. A good, strong track record of building value for us and, more importantly, for our shareholders. In conclusion, the last slide, what we deliver. We check all these boxes. Predictable costs, high quality, high margin asset base, very sustainable operations, good, strong social license made stronger by our contributions to our partners on a go-forward basis. We provide leverage to increasing precious metal prices. We do have a compelling valuation relative to our peers. We also have tax confidence. We have a good, strong agreement with the CRA here in Canada, and we're very confident about our position, and we also have a competitive dividend.
If you like precious metals, you should really like Wheaton Precious Metals.
Thank you, Randy. We'll now move into a Q&A period. We have a number of questions that have been submitted via email from our investors. I'd like to start off with the first question to you, Randy. What has been the impact of COVID-19 on countries where we have operations currently?
Well, as everyone is familiar here, there's not a country in the world that hasn't been impacted by COVID-19. We're seeing the spread into the Americas. We've seen lockdowns applied in Peru and Chile and Argentina, and we've seen, of course, Brazil, more local lockdowns put in place. In the United States, major cities have been locked down. All I can say is that we stay on top of all of our operations and on our partners' plans, and we're impressed with what's been put forth. We continue to monitor this on a regular basis and are comfortable with the efforts being made by our partners.
Thank you, Randy. The next question we have, some of the investors have asked, is whether or not we consider withholding or hoarding gold and silver and waiting for higher prices.
Short answer, no. I'll expand on the no. Our business model is to deliver profitable precious metals production to our shareholders. If some of our shareholders feel that it would make sense to hold metal, there is plenty of opportunities for them to actually hold metal. For me to force that diversity of portfolio upon all of our shareholders when some of them are only interested in that is not fair to the rest of the shareholders. We have a simple business model, deliver profitable, high quality, low cost precious metals production to our shareholders and not hoard or hold any gold and silver.
Thanks for that, Randy. The next question we have, this is relative to the dividend. We have an investor asking us, would we consider actually dividending out physical silver as opposed to a monetary payment?
As I've said several times in this presentation, I think the best way to invest into Precious Metals is owning stock in Wheaton Precious Metals. For us to actually supply metal as opposed to that would go counter to what we believe, again, is the best way to invest into Precious Metals. That's one of the reasons we have a dividend reinvestment plan in place, is we think that it's better to put more shares into our shareholders' hands than the actual metal itself.
Thanks, Randy. Now a little more in-detail questions. The next question is, how has COVID-19 actually impacted our current production base?
Well, again, this is one of the points in time that I think it reinforces how important operating margins are in terms of the quality of our assets. The bulk of our production, nearly three-quarters of our production, comes from the first quartile of the respective cost curves, which means that these assets are also very profitable for our partners on a go-forward basis. We know that they're very motivated to do everything they can to keep these operations up and running and to prevent shutdowns or slowdowns on these operations, because they do have a dramatic impact. Given the operating margins, we know that there's strong incentive to do that, and we've seen that. We monitor our partners, we talk to them on a daily basis to find out how risks are being managed.
We've been impressed at what's been done at most of the sites in terms of minimizing the amount of non-core personnel on site and controlling access to these sites, limiting travel, limiting travelers to come in, and so on. We have two mines that have gone into standby mode, the Constancia and Yauliyacu Mine. Both those mines are actually relatively small in terms of overall contribution, that's still not enough for us to back off of our production guidance for the year 2020. Again, stand firm at our 685,000-725,000 gold equivalent ounces over the course of 2020.
It's important when it comes to cash flow too, to recognize that the two mines that have been shut down are higher cost mines, and even for us, our production payments are a bit higher, and so they don't make a large part of our cash flow on a go-forward basis. Our portfolio to date, and I say to date, this is a very fluid situation, but to date, our portfolio has withstood the impact of COVID-19 relatively well. I can't guarantee where we're going to go in the next couple of weeks, but I can assure you that this portfolio is going to withstand it as good or better than any of the other portfolios out there.
Thank you, Randy. The next question we have is what your view is on precious metal prices and in particular silver, which has lagged as of late.
Look, I think we are going to see unprecedented, by magnitudes, helicopter money applied around the world. Euros will be printed, U.S. dollars will be printed. It's astounding to me how the word trillions is just being flipped around. 10 years ago, billions was being flipped around. Now we're talking trillions being flipped around. I don't know how anyone can actually be concerned or have confidence in terms of long-term store value from any of the fiat currencies in the world, including the U.S. dollar. Whenever there's a crisis, we do see a push towards the U.S. dollar and trying to increase liquidity and de-lever themselves. Usually that's followed by a shift towards some good long-term stores of value, like precious metals, like gold. We have seen gold hold some strength through here, and we're seeing some current strength here just this week.
I think we are starting to see the bull run that always follows a crisis. By no means, we haven't seen the worst of this crisis yet, so I still think we have some strength, but we're very bullish on precious metals as a whole. Even more so on the silver side. The fundamentals behind silver are better than they've ever been. We have declining production. Global mine production has dropped off. You have to remember that the bulk of silver is produced as a by-product from base metal operations, and we're seeing record low prices in the base metal space.
We're seeing low production of silver on a worldwide basis, combined with higher and higher demand from an industrial perspective, high efficiency electronics, and perhaps even more importantly in today's world, antibacterial applications and water purification systems and the likes of which are going to become more and more important all over the world. I just see strong fundamentals, and yet what we're looking at right now is a gold-silver ratio that is unheard of. We haven't seen numbers this high as long as I can remember. It's just not natural. I expect that this should normalize. We can see it shows that strength in terms of historically, which should normalize. This is a very unusual situation where we see silver priced so low relative to gold. We're very bullish on gold.
Gold has traditionally always provided support through crises like this, but we're very bullish on silver. Silver always lags, but then it outperforms. I think this is a great time to be investing in the silver space.
Thanks for that, Randy. We've had some questions. A number of our investors have reached out and asked how this was going to impact our corporate development. We had been saying earlier this year that we had a very strong pipeline for corporate development, even some larger sized deals. They're curious to see how this recent crisis has impacted that pipeline.
Well, prior to this pandemic taking root on a worldwide basis, we were very busy on that front, and we had some very exciting opportunities. We still have those exciting opportunities in front of us. However, I'm going to caution everyone, the travel restrictions have made it very tough to complete the site due diligence. I assure our investors, our shareholders, that we will not invest in something without myself putting my feet on the ground to actually, and our technical team, putting our feet on the ground to be comfortable with what these projects will deliver to us on a go-forward basis.
We have, and we still are active on some projects where the site due diligence has been checked off and working our way forward and hopeful on something being closed over the next while. With respect to new opportunities, and there will be new opportunities. The one aspect that's going to come out of this catastrophe, this pandemic, and the aftereffects, the economic effects, is that there's going to be a need for capital, even a bigger need for capital in the mining space to restart and to build up capacity again. We will be ready to supply that capacity on a go-forward basis. If it doesn't mean site visits are possible, it means we're going to go through the technical review and go as far as we can.
As soon as things are safer and travel is able, then we will, of course, hit the ground running. I expect there will be additional opportunities as a result of this.
Following up on that, if we do see good opportunities both in the near- term and once this crisis alleviates itself, we do have questions about how we could finance this if we have the balance sheet, what kind of a shape the balance sheet's in. Also, is this crisis going to impact the dividend?
As I mentioned, we've got a CAD 2 billion revolver available to us that we have used extensively over the last six and a half years to fund our growth. We don't like issuing shares. Issuing shares, it means we're diluting our existing shareholders, and so we're not in favor of that. In fact, if we had funded all of our CAD 6.5 billion of investment over the last six years by issuing shares, we'd have 14% more shares outstanding than we do today. That is a permanent dilution. That's a permanent cost to our existing shareholders. The revolver has been a very effective way of us building and growing our company and delivering real value back to our shareholders on a per-share basis. That revolver, we're still very comfortable with that.
Interest rates are very attractive, anywhere between 2%-4% and definitely shift into the low side of that range right now. Current capacity on that revolver as of December 31st was CAD 1.1 billion. We had over CAD 100 million in cash on hand. At the end of December, it had CAD 1.2 million there. We also just announced an ATM program, that's really only just another tool in the toolbox. We have no intent of issuing shares, as I've just stated. We're not a fan of that. The only time we would ever use that is if we have exhausted or gotten to the limit of our capacity on the debt side. We are very comfortable with the debt. The reason behind it is because of our cash flows. Well over CAD 600 million in cash flow coming this year.
Good, strong cash flows, good, strong growth, climbing by 10% over the next five years, averaging over the next five years. That's just with our existing asset portfolio. That's not counting in some of the other optionality that we provide. Our dividend, of course, is functioned or designed around being 30% of our average cash generated by the operating activities. I see as commodity prices climb and as our production grows, I actually see a good chance for our dividend to even climb higher as we have production growth and strong commodity prices over the next few years. Very strong balance sheet. Very ample capacity to grow.
Randy, that brings us to the end of our questions.
Great. Well, thank you, everyone, for listening, and I wish everyone the best possible. Stay healthy through this process, through this pandemic. I can assure you that we at Wheaton are doing our best to try and minimize risk and to try and maintain our strong profile. We're also doing our best to try and help our partners and our neighbors around us to survive through this. We will come out of this stronger, and it's just the right thing to do. Our company is in a good, strong position, and I thank those that have invested into us, and I look forward to bringing on any new investors. Thank you.