Well, good morning, everyone. It's always a pleasure to be in Zurich. I don't know how many folks from the audience live and in and around Zurich, but if you do, you're very lucky. It's a beautiful, beautiful city, and it's always a pleasure to be here. My name is Ammar Al-Joundi. I have the pleasure of being the CEO at Agnico Eagle. We are a company we've been around since 1957. We are very gold-focused. We produce about 98% of our revenue comes from gold. We have a strategy I want to talk about, and it's really a strategy that we've had for those same 67 years that we've been in operation. I've got six slides talking about the company. I hope it'll be pretty efficient. Our story really is quite simple.
Our story is we want to be a simple business operating in safe jurisdictions with a strategy that makes sense and is really focused on per-share metrics, and I think you'll see that. But what I'm going to do is something I never do, ever. I'm going to talk a little bit about gold. And I don't like to talk about gold specifically because there are lots of people out there who know more about it, including our previous guest, and you'll see lots of slides. But I want to talk about it from a different perspective. I want to talk about it from something that I've observed. I've been doing this for 25 years. I talk to a lot of investors. And I'll tell you, in the last three to six months, I've seen something different, and that's why I'm going to put up one slide.
What I've seen is from big generalist investors. Over the last three to six months, or starting maybe three to six months ago, I saw a lot of the big generalist investors, and I'm talking very big, start to be more interested in gold. Now, they're always looking at gold. They understand it as a diversification.
They're sort of intrigued with it. To be perfectly frank, they are not enthralled with it, but they appreciate and they understand it. T hree to six months ago, a lot more questions, a lot of interest on gold, and I think this is partly what's driving it. What I'm going to talk about here is, remember, from an investor's perspective. I put two of the slides up, and there were many slides and many discussions we had, but I think these are pretty effective. What you see on the right is a table.
Since 1929, there have been 15 market corrections. The average correction is down 36%. So these are equity market corrections. In 14 of those 15 corrections, 14 out of 15, gold outperformed the market. It outperformed the market by an astonishing 45%. Now, gold didn't go up 45%, but it outperformed by 45%. And this is the important thing that I took from this. It's not so much that I think the big generalist investors are bullish on gold. In fact, they're nervous about the market, and that's why they're interested in gold. If you take a look at the left, and this is the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index, it's not a perfect comparison, but it kind of gives you the gist. This is the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index versus the S&P 500 ratio.
The top is when the commodity index outperformed materially, and at the bottom of the chart is when the equities have way outperformed commodities. And you'll see that there's volatility. You would expect it. And if you go sort of to the middle of the chart, between the peaks and the bottom, it's a multiple of eight, a multiple of eight. And so if you take a look at the peaks of commodities, they happen when you would expect in a crisis. Two of them were political crises. One of them was an economic crisis. But at the bottom, what you'll see is when you've had a very long run of exceptional equity performance. You had that by the time you got into the early 1970s. You certainly had that at the dot-com bubble [ND] and the now what they call everything bubble.
What I think is happening right now is, and especially since the great financial crisis, governments have been putting so much money into the markets that all hard assets have gone up. They tell you inflation's 2%. Try to buy a house. Try to buy equity. Try to buy gold. All right? I came into this business in 1999. Gold was $260. People have hated it since. It's $2,300 today. I think this is important because a lot of big generalist investors who have a lot of money, I think, are getting nervous. I think they're nervous with a $34 trillion U.S. deficit. I think they're nervous about the election. I think they're nervous about elections worldwide. I think they're nervous about Russia. I think they're nervous about China.
I think that this is something that I really haven't heard as strongly in 25 years, and I thought it was just worth spending a moment on it. So I want to talk about Agnico and who we are and what we do. Most of our peers are global gold mining companies, and it's rational, the logic there being, if you're going to be a gold miner, you've got to go where the gold is, regardless of where it is. And that's a good strategy. That makes sense for them. It's not our strategy. At Agnico Eagle, we are a regional gold mining company. We operate in four countries and in five regions. For us, the criteria of a region, and this has been our strategy since 1957, and it works, our strategy for location is based on two things.
1, does it have the geologic potential, but for multiple mines over multiple decades? We don't think it makes sense to go somewhere to build one mine because you can't really build a competitive advantage. You can do it as well as the next person, but if I don't have a team in country X and I want to build a mine there, even if it's a good mine, I have to bring in engineers from country Y. I have to bring in employees from country Z. I have to develop relationships. It's hard to get a competitive advantage. So one, it has to have the geologic potential for multiple mines over multiple decades. And two, this seems self-evident, but you'd be surprised, it has to have the political stability to actually build and operate multiple mines over multiple decades.
If it takes you four five years of exploration, five years of permitting, three years to build it, four years to get your money back, you don't want the government to basically pull the rug out from underneath you. So our strategy is we're not global. We're regional. We're regional based on geologic and political stability. And in the entire world, in our view, the three best places for geologic potential for multiple mines, political stability, are probably Nevada and Barrick and Newmont have done a good job consolidating that. Western Australia, it's fantastic for gold and for other metals. It's not really consolidated, though. Western Australia is still pretty open. But we think the very best of those is the Abitibi region of Canada where we are, where we've been since 1957, where there's been more gold there produced than either of the other two.
And Agnico alone, in the last 10 years, has added 25 million ounces to our projects there. So does this strategy work? Is it a good strategy? Well, what I've got here, if you take a look on the left, since 2005, so the last 18 years, we've grown our mines from one mine to 11. So we operate in the Abitibi that I talked about. We operate in northern Canada. We operate in Mexico, northern Europe, and in Australia. We've gone from one country to four countries. We've gone from 240,000 ounces of production to about 3.4 million ounces of production, good growth by any measure. But quite honestly, you don't care about that. You don't care about absolute size. You only care about the last two, which are per-share metrics, because our job is always per-share focused.
In that same time frame, we've grown gold production by about 2.5 times per share. So if you like gold and you're constructive on gold, why would you buy a gold equity? Why wouldn't you just buy the ETF? The reason you buy a gold equity is because, in theory, it gives you more than a bar of gold. Now, you might buy a gold equity for the leverage. Leverage goes both ways, but fair enough, if you're constructive on gold, you could buy a gold equity. But in the long run, by definition, you're taking more risk with a gold equity. Why would you buy a gold equity? It has to do better than a gold bar.
At Agnico Eagle, over the last 18 years, we've given you 2.5 times the amount of gold per dollar that you put in, importantly, and the gold bar has come nowhere near that. Our dividend yield has gone up by a factor of 50, 50 times. What would you expect? In the share price performance over that same period of time, we try to take a long look, and share price performance, one week you outperform, one week you don't. But over that period of time, our share price has had a compounded annual growth rate of 8%. Compare that to the index. The gold index is maybe 2% because the gold index has benefited from, remember, the gold price has gone up a lot in that time frame, but a lot of companies, while they've maybe grown, they haven't grown per share.
Our entire outperformance versus the index isn't because we're smarter or harder working or we have any particular trick. It's simple. We've added more gold per share. Simple. That's what we try to do. And we do that by going into regions where we know there's a lot of gold, where we know we have political stability, and try to be the best miners in the regions that we operate. Now, everybody will tell you they're the best miners. They've got the best engineers. They have the best trucks. They're the most whatever. And quite honestly, I know a lot of the guys and the businessmen and women, and they are very, very smart, very hardworking.
When you've got 15,000 people in a company, it's really hard to say, "I'm much different." But what I can tell you at Agnico, in the Abitibi, where we've been working for over 60 years, we're the best miners. Why? Because we've been there for 60 years. We're the employee of choice. Our turnover is a third that of our competitors. We know all the contractors. We know all the suppliers. We know the permitting. Honestly, it's not rocket science. It's just old-fashioned focus. Go to the best places and try to be the best. It's still working. I put up this slide. This is our year-end results. We've had, in the 67-year history of the company, record cash flow, record production, record reserves, and importantly, the safest year we've ever had in the 67-year history of the company.
So a simple strategy: try to go to places where you think there's a lot of gold, where you can build a lot of mines, where you think you can operate for a long time, and try to get a competitive advantage, not because you're smarter or harder working, but just because you've been there a long time. We produce more gold in Canada than the next eight companies combined. So we have a competitive advantage. And then just briefly, I want to talk about specifically what we're going to be doing over the next couple of years. We have a lot of projects, but all of our projects, which you're going to see, are leveraging off existing infrastructure in regions where we've been operating for decades, where we have a competitive advantage.
I'm going to repeat the same thing a few times here, which is return on capital and risk-adjusted return on capital. This gets to that previous slide where I talked about how much we've grown and said, "That shouldn't matter." All that really matters is per share because shares, by definition, that's the capital. The more you grow per share, the better return on your capital, the better risk-adjusted, that's what we try to do. So this chart here shows the Abitibi region of Ontario and Quebec where we've been operating. Item number one is Detour Lake. Item number two is Canadian Malartic. And then item number three, let's call that consolidation of the Abitibi. So Detour Lake and Canadian Malartic are two of the biggest mines in the world. Detour Lake is a mine that Placer was mining in the '80s. Canadian Malartic was discovered in 1923.
So this shows you the potential of this region. Between Detour Lake and Canadian Malartic in the last seven years, we found 25 million additional ounces. Remember, one of these mines has been around for over 100 years. Both of these mines have mills, have infrastructure, have power, have camps. To find 25 million ounces in something you already own with existing infrastructure, with existing workforce, in a safe jurisdiction, you will never get a better risk-adjusted return on capital ever in our business. Where we really make money as a mining company isn't just building a mine. It's actually expanding it. So at Detour Lake, again, two of the biggest mines in the world, Detour Lake's producing about 650,000 ounces a year. It's got a mine life well past 2050. It's got resources under that.
We're looking to see if we can get that mine to over 1 million ounces a year. We're going to be talking about it in the middle of this year. Watch for news on that. Canadian Malartic, again, a mine discovered originally by the Gouldie brothers in 1923, the largest open-pit mine in Canada, transitioning to the largest underground mine in Canada. When we do that, we're going to go from roughly 60,000 tons a day of open pit at about 0.9 grams to about 20,000 tons a day underground at a little under 2.5 grams. We're going to maintain the roughly 600,000 ounces a year of production, but we're going to free up 40,000 tons a day of spare milling capacity. A big mill is about 10,000 tons a day.
So imagine sparing up the equivalent of about four big mills, infrastructure already there in the most prospective place in the world to be mining for gold. We've been for 60 years. We know all the junior companies. We know all the intermediate companies. It's kind of funny. They're now coming to us and saying, "Look, their mine plans are using our mills." And this is interesting. Again, return on capital. Most people in my position would say, "We're going to go out and buy a bunch of things to fill that mill." We might. But you know what might also make sense is let somebody else build the mines and use our mill, toll milling, because that's an infinite return on capital. Again, a focus on per-share metrics and return on capital.
So Detour Lake, targeting to go working on a plan to go to over 1 million ounces a year, Canadian Malartic, transitioning from Canada's biggest open pit to Canada's biggest underground and freeing up a lot of capacity in the mill. And then the third box there is about consolidating some of the land position we have. If you look carefully in that blue box, I don't know if you can see it, but there's a little red line and a little black line. That's the road and the railway. The road and the railway, obviously, are built based on where the mines were 100 years ago. The blue are the land positions we control. We control most of that belt, and we're looking to consolidate it.
We're looking to bring in potentially three new mines over the next few years using, again, existing infrastructure in places we have a competitive advantage. It's a simple business. I'm not going to a country I've never been to before. I'm not hiring people I've never met before. I'm not entering into a community I haven't been to before. If we take a look at now northern Canada, this is part of Nunavut. So for you unfamiliar with Canada, Nunavut is in the north. Nunavut is 3.5 times the size of France. It's got a population of 35,000 or 40,000 people. So imagine in your head a country the size of France with a population of, let's call it, 12,000 people. It's wide open. It's got huge potential. One company, us, we're 35%-40% of the GDP, not the mining GDP, the entire GDP.
We have 10 flights a week from Montreal to Val-d'Or to these mines up there. We can explore for $0.30 on the dollar versus our peers because of our infrastructure, our logistics. That's a competitive advantage. That's a competitive advantage in a place three and a half times the size of France that's wide open. We have a world-class mine at Meliadine that we're expanding. We have a world-class mine at Amaruq and Meadowbank that we're expanding. And by the way, Amaruq is a satellite deposit of Meadowbank, which was the original mine. So it sort of shows you leverage off your existing infrastructure. And we're looking at a mine up in Hope Bay that we think has great potential. So to summarize who we are and what we do, we're the same company we've been since 1957. We've grown organically.
We have a good track record of creating value per share, very simply because we create more gold per share by being in the best regions and by trying to build a competitive advantage. We want to stay in the low-risk regions, be the highest-quality gold producer. We think we're uniquely positioned where we are, and we've got a very strong financial profile and balance sheet and cash flow generation. So that's Agnico Eagle. My name's Ammar Al-Joundi. Thank you very much for your time.
Thanks very much, Ammar. Unfortunately, I don't think we have time for questions, but thanks very much for the presentation.
Thank you.