All right. Good morning, everyone. We'll kick things off here in our silver sessions this morning. Our first presenter is Coeur Mining. I do have to let you know that we are restricted on Coeur Mining at BMO Capital Markets. Coeur Mining is a diversified North America-focused precious metals producer, and we're joined today by Coeur's CEO, Mitchell Krebs.
Well, thank you, Kevin. Surprised they even let you be in this room with me.
By Coeur's CEO, Mitchell Krebs.
Well, thank you, Pat Godin from New Gold, who's also in the audience, my partner and friend, who together we're trying to create, a exciting, new, unique company I'll talk more about here in a few minutes. My team over here, Tom Whelan, our CFO, and Jeff Wilhoit, who heads up investor relations. We'll get going here. Just by way of background, if you're not familiar with who Coeur Mining is, we're a 98-year-old American company. And when I say American, I mean America, U.S. listed, U.S. domiciled, U.S. incorporated in Delaware, about everything you can be as far as an American company.
We have five open pit and underground operations, three in the U.S. and two in Mexico, and we'll be adding two in Canada here, hopefully soon, as a result of the New Gold transaction. Our market cap is currently a little over $15 billion. We trade these days over $500 million of stock a day on the NYSE. A lot of liquidity for all of you big institutions out there. I mean, you go back just 10 years ago, our market cap was $250 million. It's come a long way in a short period of time. A lot of that's price-driven, but a lot of that's due to the things that we've been working on.
You know, and our mission has really been to try and build a global precious metals leader and remain a dominant silver company. The way we're trying to do that is by staying focused on North America only, by always maintaining a nice balance across the portfolio of assets, and by that, I mean balance across operations, so that we're not overly concentrated on one particular asset. We're not particularly concentrated on any one metal, and we're not concentrated on any one particular jurisdiction. We've got nice balance across North America. We'll have an even better balance across North America on the back of the New Gold transaction.
The metrics that matter to us, you know, how we define success are things like ROIC, free cash flow per share, margins, not growth for growth's sake, not trying to get bigger just for the sake of getting bigger, not chasing ounces just to show higher production profiles. Our mission are to, and this overhaul of this 90-year-old company has really gained a lot of momentum here in just the last few years. It started probably five years ago, a little more than five years ago, with heavy reinvestment back into the business in exploration and in expansions. That wasn't easy to do. I mean, there was some lower price environments over the last five, six, seven years. It made it hard to do, but we stayed committed to it.
Stretched the balance sheet, but we also thought it was really critical that we deliver on longer mine lives and on some efficiencies that we could gain from some investment in expansions. As those investments started to pay off, it created some tailwinds, some momentum for us that we took advantage of to acquire a company called SilverCrest Metals. That closed about a year ago. Right now, that added a really nice high-grade silver and gold operation in Mexico, in Sonora. Super high grade, super low cost, that's been a great addition to the company. It also allowed us to kind of accelerate our de-leveraging efforts on the back of all that investment. SilverCrest brought to us a great balance sheet and strong cash flow, and that was a great tailwind through 2025.
That set us up then to turn our focus to the next opportunity, which is New Gold, which we announced last November. The New Gold transaction is so exciting for us. For New Gold, it's a massive leap forward. When you think about, you know, what we're trying to create, this vision of being a global leader, it really is a big step forward in doing that. It's a totally unique platform that we're creating at just the right time. With New Gold, we'll be adding two lower-cost Canadian operations, so we'll have, along with our five US and Mexican operations, we'll have seven across North America. Sorry, I'm not feeling great. It'll be a real free cash flow machine.
We'll be having an investment-grade balance sheet that Tom will enjoy overseeing. We'll have great trading liquidity, great growth, and above that, we'll have excess capital that we can return back to shareholders. As a U.S. company, we'll be eligible for some key U.S. index inclusions, and that includes even the S&P 500. Sorry. With the addition of Las Chispas last year, with the New Gold assets on the back of the Rochester expansion, where that will leave us is with a nice mix of U.S., Canada, and Mexico. 82% of our revenue will be U.S. and Canada, about 18% Mexico. Just for reference, last year, on a standalone basis, Mexico was about 45% of our revenue, so this really tilts us back more toward the U.S.
Sorry, more toward the Canada and U.S. This is really a transaction about making us better, not just bigger. You can see a few of the metrics there that we are focused on, things like the cost coming down almost 20%, margins being boosted, liquidity much stronger, the balance sheet bolstered. On a free cash flow per share basis, this is like a 40% accretion per share, which is really hard to find when you're looking for external opportunities. Just a real quick synopsis of the 2 New Gold assets. New Afton is in British Columbia. Rainy River is in Ontario. New Afton is a block cave mine with a great future ahead of it.
Pat and his team have done a tremendous job of getting New Afton set up with the C-Zone, which will start generating super strong cash flow here over the next few years. The longer-term potential out there is the C-Zone. When we close the transaction, we'll announce finally an initial resource on the C-Zone, and I think that'll start to give people a better sense of what the longer-term potential at New Afton is. New Afton is an incredibly high-quality, low-cost, copper and gold operation just outside of Kamloops, out there in BC. Rainy River, I mentioned that's an open pit and underground operation, transitioning from open pit to underground. There's a lot of opportunity, a lot of potential at Rainy River. Pat and his team have done an amazing job of setting Rainy River up for success.
In fact, if you look at the 2025 results out of Rainy River, you'll see that it was by far the largest cash flow generator for New Gold. The third and fourth quarters were super strong there. There's a lot of parallels with Rainy River and our Palmarejo mine down in Mexico. A few years ago, we transitioned Palmarejo from open pit to underground. What's great about Rainy River as well is it's got a 25,000 ton a day mill sitting there. The opportunity that we see there is to sustain a higher level of exploration and keep that mill full for as long as we can.
I think in five years from now, when we look back on this transaction, we'll all say that, "Wow, Rainy River was the big surprise in this combined company." It has a 50 sq km land position there that has really only begun to be touched from an exploration standpoint. I think if we can take the same playbook that we've applied to a lot of our operations, where we increase exploration, maintain a higher level of exploration over time, it's gonna pay off, and we're gonna see a lot longer mine life out of Rainy River. It's starting off. I mean, the mine life on reserves only is till 2033, so that's not a bad place to start.
We see a lot of potential up there at Rainy River. Just pivoting quick to the fourth quarter and full-year results that we put out last week. Like a lot of companies, record results for both the fourth quarter and the full year. We produced about 420,000 oz of gold, about 18 million oz of silver. That's 23% higher year-over-year on gold, 57% higher year-over-year on silver, and that really reflects a couple of things. The addition of Las Chispas for 10 and a half months last year, the continued ramp-up of our Rochester silver and gold mine out in Nevada.
That was one of those big expansions that I was talking about earlier, that we're now over the hump on, and we're starting to see the benefits of that, in particular in the fourth quarter, where Rochester had a really strong quarter. Net income was up 10x year-over-year to $586 million. Our cash increased 10-fold year-over-year. We ended the year in a nice, strong net cash position, which was a big goal of ours. You don't have to go back too far. Our balance sheet was almost 4.5x leveraged. We've come a long way in a short period of time in terms of now getting to a strong net cash position and building rapidly. Our EBITDA last year was over $1 billion.
Free cash flow was $666 million. By a long stretch, these are all-time company bests, and we have a lot of records that we set last year. I love the bars, especially on the right, because it shows how far we've come in such a short period of time. Granted, some of this, obviously, is pure, is price-driven, but a lot of it is volume driven from those expansions that I was talking about. On top of that, acquisitions, like Las Chispas. Literally, just in 2023, our EBITDA was $142 million. Like I said, last year, just over $1 billion. On the heels of the New Gold combination, that'll be over $3 billion on a combined basis.
Same story on a free cash flow basis. Just three years ago, free cash flow was -$300 million when we were busy reinvesting back into the business as heavily as we were. Last year, over $660 million on our way to well north of $2 billion on a combined basis. So I think a lot of people are still playing catch-up in terms of how much the company's changed in such a short period of time. It's a fun story to tell investors about who maybe haven't been keeping up on the company over the last few years. Of course, with this cash flow, the balance sheet has healed very quickly.
You can see where we were starting to get awfully stretched back there in 2023, coming out of that Rochester expansion. Now we ended the year with strong liquidity, net cash, and the cash is continuing to build up pretty quickly. In fact, this used to be probably the slide that we spent the most time talking about with investors. Now we sort of just gloss right by it. With these results, again, some of it's price-driven, some of it's the reinvestment, some of it's acquisitions, you know, I talked about ROIC earlier on. We're really proud of the fact that we ended last year with a 26% return on invested capital.
This year, we're set up to see something in the mid-40s. We don't just talk about ROIC. Our comp is tied to ROIC. Long-term comp is tied to ROIC, reserve and resource growth, and free cash flow per share. Good alignment with what we consider to be real key value drivers for the business. Also, with this free cash flow, and one of the main reasons we've seen that ROIC go up the way it has is as a result of the exploration investments that we've been making. This year, in 2026, is gonna be no exception.
On a standalone basis, this is before New Gold is added to the mix, we're gonna have almost a 50% increase in our overall exploration investment across the company. That's had tremendous success for the company. You can see here, it's a little hard to tell, but we've driven double-digit increases across all the categories. One of the knocks on this company, if you go back five or 10 years ago, it was short mine lives, high costs, and a bad balance sheet. We've really now addressed all of those and have turned what were weaknesses really now into strengths. There's a couple of good examples of some of the year-end 2025 exploration results that came out of our reserve and resource report that we published last week.
Probably the headline was the Wharf mine out in South Dakota. This was an old Goldcorp asset that we acquired in 2015 for $99 million. This is one of my favorite slides. Since then, we've taken out $665 million of free cash flow. When we bought it had about a five-year mine life. It's actually had a five-year mine life for about 42 years now, going back to when it first started up. We invested a little more exploration dollars last year, like $9 million, and we were able to double the mine life at the end of last year, now to 12 years. It's been five or six years for 42 years. Now, Wharf has a 12-year mine life ahead of it, based on reserves only.
We also added over 1 million oz of inferred resources, so we're gonna see some further conversion of that material into reserves as well, and that mine life at Wharf is gonna keep extending. This is, like, the poster child for ROIC that we always use internally and externally. What the case has been, that if we'll invest $3 million, $4 million, or $5 million a year in exploration, we'll typically get another year of mine life. One year of mine life out there is $100 million-$150 million of free cash flow. If you can put in $3 or $5 and get back $100 or $150, we'll keep doing that all day long, and that'll keep driving the ROIC higher in the business. Wharf's been a great success.
Palmarejo, down in Mexico, in Chihuahua, this is, I think, its 16th year, maybe 17th year in operation. It's had a six or seven-year mine life. It's now entirely underground. We just added 5 years to its reserve mine life at the end of the year. We've invested a lot of capital down there in exploration. It's probably one of our highest ROIC opportunities. We've been busy consolidating the land off to the east at Palmarejo. It's taken probably 10 years to do that, why that's important is because the Palmarejo mine itself is covered by a really onerous Franco-Nevada gold stream. The more that we can do to develop new mining sources that are outside of that area of interest, of that gold stream, there's a lot of margin opportunity for us. We're.
I think this year, 70% of our exploration budget is gonna be off to the east there on that non-Franco-Nevada ground. There's a big opportunity there that we're chasing, not only for additional mine life, but for that higher margin. Inside that area of interest now, half of the gold that we produce, we have to sell to Franco-Nevada for $800 an ounce, which hurts. The more that we can develop off to the east and sell all of our gold for $5,000, it's a big opportunity down there at Palmarejo. Las Chispas, on sticking with the exploration theme, this is the asset that we got when we acquired SilverCrest. Well, it contributed ten and a half months last year.
By the way, in that ten and a half months, it generated more free cash flow than any of our other mines last year, $285 million of free cash flow in ten and a half months. It's been a great, a great addition. We were able to replace what we mined last year in year one, coming out of the gates, which is a great success, just given everything else that we had going on there with the integration and getting everybody kind of on the same page. We're really excited about the opportunity there to keep replacing what we mine and keep that high-margin mine going for a long time.
In the interest of time, I'll skip the Rochester update because I feel like with the strong fourth quarter, I don't know, based on yesterday's meetings, we don't get any more Rochester questions. That used to be the question that we got more than anything, was, "How's Rochester doing?" Based on the fourth quarter, Rochester is doing just great, and we're gonna see another step up in Rochester's performance this year over last year. This year, it'll produce around 7 million oz of silver, around 70,000 oz of gold, 16-year mine life out ahead of it, northern Nevada. It was a great investment, like I said, I think just in the fourth quarter, $78 million of free cash flow, and that was at an average realized silver price of about $50 an ounce.
It's gonna be a huge year for Rochester. Just to wrap up, look, we've been the safest mining company in America the last three years, so we're gonna do everything we can to build off of that. Safety and environmental performance always is at the top of any list of priorities. Obviously, closing New Gold and having a as smooth of a integration as possible is key. We're on track to close in the first quarter. Here we sit now, second half of February. We're not too far away from when we should see a closing on that transaction. On the heels of that, we will come out with a lot of news, actually.
We'll come out with consolidated guidance, Coeur plus New Gold for the remainder of the year. We'll come out with reserve and resource updates on both New Afton and Rainy River, and that New Afton update will include the first look at a C-Zone resource, which a lot of people are focused on. Consolidated guidance, reserve and resource updates, return of capital strategy going forward. You know, we're gonna be generating a lot of free cash flow. We'll reinvest in everything that we can that has good returns, we're still gonna have excess cash. Having a robust approach to returning capital has been a big focus of our shareholders, of New Gold shareholders, we look forward to articulating that on the heels of the New Gold closing.
Even though I'm talking about returning capital, building up a cash balance, I don't think there's anything to apologize for having a big cash balance. You know, this is a company historically, that's always had to kind of fight and claw and scratch its way through low-price environments. With the resiliency and the durability of this combined company going forward, we're never gonna be in that position again. One of the ways that we can make sure that we can be opportunistic, even during weak periods, price periods, is having a strong cash balance. We'll build up a good war chest, but also focus on responsibly returning capital back to shareholders as well.
Consistency, you know, doing what we say, seems like a low bar, but in this industry, being able to do that over time, and gaining the trust of your employees, communities, investors, goes a long way. So we're gonna focus on delivering and executing across the portfolio. With all of that investment in exploration, it's really important that we see the results from those investments across the portfolio. Then Silvert ip, that's a high-grade silver, zinc, lead, project up in northern British Columbia.
That's probably, you know, with the way the stars have aligned with the silver price, with Canada's support of critical minerals projects, that's probably an opportunity for us to have that next leg of growth on the silver side of the business, there from northern British Columbia, which would be a nice second asset to have along with New Afton out there in BC. We'll keep moving that along here in 2026. Like I said, coming out with some news here on the heels of the New Gold closing in the next few weeks. With that, I know you can't ask me any questions, but if anybody else wants to, I'd be happy to try and answer them.
Yep. The audience, feel free to either put your questions into the conference app, and I can read them out, or just raise your hand, we can get you a microphone.
First presentation. Oh, there we go.
Got one over there.
Maybe just a quick one. I think I can project. I mean, you guys are blessed to have a nice footprint across North America now, and in previous cycles, I think one of the prices go up and costs go up, labor, materials, across US, Canada, Mexico, and how that's informing your plans this year?
Yeah, in case you didn't hear, the question was just, you know, around costs. What are we seeing on the cost side of the business? Any cost pressures? Tom, feel free to add anything to it, but, you know, we typically in our earnings deck, we will show four cost buckets that make up about two-thirds of our OpEx. Power, labor, diesel, and is it consumables? The only one where we're seeing some pressure is on labor. We're seeing some pressure on just on the overall tax side, right? We're paying a lot more taxes, on royalties that we pay to third parties. That's another component of cost that's going up with these higher prices. Overall, probably 3%-5% inflation. You know, with the Mexican peso.
That's another component that's adding some additional costs for us this year. On those other cost buckets, you know, whether it's you look quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year, or even back over the last two or three years, those have actually kind of rolled over and stayed fairly.