Upstart news everyone. Thank you. My name is Michael Matheson. I'm an equity analyst with Sidoti. Today, we're pleased to have with us the team from Gold Royalty Corporation. Before I introduce them, just a couple of housekeeping things. We really encourage questions and participation. To ask a question, you'll see at the bottom of your screen a little box that says More with three dots. Click the box, and it will offer you a Q&A screen. Type in your question, and we'll read them out toward the end of the presentation, where we've reserved about 10 minutes for questions. Again, Gold Royalty Corporation presenting today will be David Garofalo, CEO. David, please take it away.
Good afternoon and good morning, as the case may be, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. Just in terms of some basic facts, Gold Royalty is traded on NYSE American under the trading symbol GROY. We also have some warrants outstanding as well. They mature in May of 2027. They trade under the same symbol with the .W suffix if you're looking for another way with a bit more torque to play the name. Gold Royalty Corp was founded five years ago privately. We took it public on the NYSE American in March of 2021, initially with 18 royalties that were written on the underlying gold development assets of our former parent company, GoldMining Inc., a spinout raising $90 million U.S. on the NYSE American at a price at that time of $5 per share. The stock went to $7 shortly after the IPO, recognizing that we had a very strong multiple, particularly relative to our competitors. We initially pursued a roll-up strategy that allowed us to significantly diversify our royalty portfolio. We bought three companies in the course of nine months, all similar in size to us, effectively adding about 150 royalties into the portfolio as a result of those acquisitions, and meaningfully brought in some cash-flowing royalties into the portfolio to supplement the significant mineral endowment we had in the royalties on the underlying assets that were spun out of GoldMining Inc. Today we're at about 250 royalties in the portfolio, seven of them cash-flowing, 14 in various stages of development and construction. That gives us peer-leading revenue growth and GEO growth, gold equivalent ounce growth of 360% over the next five years from the existing portfolio of 250 royalties, which I hasten to add are completely bought and paid for. We have no installment payments. We have no capital calls. As these assets are built out, optimized, expanded, explored, we get the full benefit of that upside, but it's completely done off the balance sheet of our operating partners. We have no requirements to put any more additional capital to realize that growth, and that will entail significant free cash flow generation. In fact, this is the first year of positive free cash flow in our history. We've gone from a startup, a concept five years ago, literally on the back of a napkin at a cafe, to one where we have 250 royalties and we're growing to almost 30,000 oz of gold equivalent production by the end of the decade. It gets a very low operating cost base. Maybe that'll just allow me to spend a couple of minutes talking about the royalty model for those that are not familiar with it. Maybe Jackie will just skip back to the introduction slide for a moment, and I'll talk a little bit about our portfolio. Effectively, what a royalty company is, is we own exposure through the top line of a mine. Effectively, we're providing capital to the developers, the explorers, the operators to help them build and optimize and explore their mines and their deposits. We take a royalty, a gross revenue royalty back in return. We get a percentage of the top line. What that effectively allows us to do is realize the full upside in the gold price unmitigated by inflation. We have no exposure to the operating costs at a mine site. We have full exposure to the gold price upside and any upside they realize in any expansions they undertake in their operations or any exploration they undertake on their properties over the course of the mine's life. Our royalties run with the land. They run with the property. They cannot be divided. They cannot be diluted, nor can they be mitigated by operating cost inflation, which is an important differentiator from our operating company. Operating companies obviously have a full upside to the exploration that they realize on their properties and the expansions, but what they're mitigated by is inflation and their operating capital costs. We have no such exposure in our model. We're effectively a bank singularly focused on providing capital to the operators and taking a piece of the action back, if you will, in the form of a percentage of the top line of the revenue. That's an important distinction. Once we own the royalty, we own it forever. It's perpetual. It runs with the land. It can't be divided. It can't be diluted. We really have unmitigated and infinite optionality on the exploration and the gold price upside of those properties that we have royalties on. We have 250 royalties in the portfolio, so we're very well diversified. That's another key distinction of a royalty company relative to an operating company, as there's no limit to how much we can diversify. We could run a company 10x the size with the same human footprint we have today. We have a little over a dozen employees, and we could again run a portfolio of 2,500 royalties if we wanted to with the same number of people. We've added nobody to the organization really since the IPO other than maybe one person and effectively have scaled up the business with the same human footprint. Our G&A costs have remained flat. We have no operating costs other than the cost of running a public company with a small group of executives. With a small group of executives that I should hasten to add have significant industry experience. I've spent 35 years in the gold mining industry and base metal. I ran Goldcorp, which we merged with Newmont back in 2019. At the time, it was the third biggest gold company in the world. I ran Hudbay on the copper side. Before that was the CFO of Agnico Eagle, which today is the biggest gold mining company in the world. I come from a development and operations background, and that's a recurring theme within our management and board. We have collectively within our very small management and board, less than 20 people collectively, 400 years of industry experience. Importantly, industry experience on the development and operations side, and that's unique among the royalty universe. Virtually all the royalty companies, our peers in the space, are run by financial engineers. We're run by people that have actually built and operated mines, which gives us two distinct advantages. One is we have a clear-eyed view of the underlying risk of what's being built and operated, so we can evaluate that risk readily and price that risk appropriately within the return proposition that we're looking for in royalties we're investing in. It also gives us tremendous connectivity because, like myself, many of my board and management have come from large-cap producers, and there isn't anybody in the industry that we can't pick up the phone and talk to in order to get an opportunity before our peers are even aware of it. That's why we've been able to grow this portfolio so quickly and in such a diversified fashion. We've done it on a bilateral basis at each and every one of the acquisitions we've made. In other words, we didn't have competitors, so we were able to price the risk appropriately and get a very strong rate of return for our shareholders. The other reason we've been able to do that as well is because we have diverse growth platforms. We have four of them, in fact. There are really only four ways to grow in the royalty business, and we do all of them extremely well. We've done M&A exceedingly well when we had the currency to do so. As I said, we rolled up three of our competitors over the course of 2021 in nine short months. When our currency just simply wasn't there anymore because of the de-rating we experienced in the gold sector from 2022 onwards, we focused on other ways to grow. We had $90 million in our treasury from the IPO. We started acquiring royalties from third parties who were looking to monetize royalties that they already established. We did royalty financings where we provided project financing for construction of mines so that those mines could be built, and we got a royalty back in return. We also generate royalties organically. What that means is with a very small team in Nevada, Quebec, and Ontario, we stake exploration claims. In other words, we stake properties around existing mines and deposits. That's done for virtually no cost. We vend those properties to the neighboring operators who then conduct the exploration or mine development on their balance sheet and take a royalty back in return. Through our sweat equity, about a third of the royalties that we have in our portfolio, over 70 of them, were generated for free. Not only do we get those royalties for free, we often get option payments on the properties from the operators, and we get about $3 million- $4 million of option revenue per annum over and above our royalty revenue. That largely defrays our G&A costs. About 50% of our G&A costs are covered from this royalty generator model. Not only are we generating these royalties for free, we're getting paid to generate these royalties because of the expertise we have on the ground in those key jurisdictions, Nevada, Quebec, and Ontario. What this all means in terms of our growth, maybe we can go to the next slide, Jackie, is that, and I am skipping around a little bit, we're going from about 6,000 gold equivalent ounces of production this year to almost 30,000 oz of gold equivalent production by the end of the year. Those are ounces attributable to us by virtue of our royalties, and they're coming from some of the largest scale mines in North America. We have royalties on three of the five biggest producing gold mines in North America, namely Agnico Eagle's Canadian Malartic mine in northwestern Quebec, IAMGOLD's Côté Mine in northern Ontario, which represent two of the largest three operating mines in Canada. We also have a royalty on the underground extension of Goldstrike, which is the largest producing gold mine in the U.S., operated by Barrick and Newmont in Nevada. Not only do we have this collection of diverse assets within those key jurisdictions, but we have some foundational assets with multiple decades of reserve life ahead of them that represent annuities that will be paying our shareholders for decades to come. That is, again, another key distinction relative to our peers in that we have high-quality assets in some of the best jurisdictions of the world with the best capitalized operators, which is extremely important. You want to make sure that you have operators that have the balance sheet and the technical capacity to optimize their operations, both from an exploration and operations and development standpoint. You want those key operators, and we certainly have not only a diversity of assets, but a diversity of operators with well-capitalized balance sheets to optimize their assets over the course of time. What this translates to in terms of cash flow is dramatic cash flow growth over the course of the next five years from the growth profile that I outlined a little earlier on. We are going again from, as you can see in the yellow bars, those are the volumes. We are going from about 6,000 oz of gold equivalent in 2025 to close to 30,000 oz of gold equivalent by 2029. Those I-beams that you see in blue represent our guidance. The yellow actually represents the consensus estimates of our six analysts that cover us across the space. We have overlaid our own production guidance, which is a little bit higher because there have been a number of expansions that have been announced in a number of these assets recently that the sell-side community has not had an opportunity to incorporate into their models yet. I am sure they will, and they will catch up in terms of our own estimates of guidance. If you overlay a gold price assumption on those volumes, that is what those line graphs represent. We have overlaid our revenue estimates on that volume. It is simple arithmetic. That volume multiplied by the gold price, pick your assumption. We have laid out $2,400 - $3,600 an ounce range. That brings us upwards at current gold prices, close to $90 million of revenue by the end of the decade. Our G&A costs are $7 million- $8 million per annum. Not only are they flat, they've actually come down over the last several years as we've realized synergies from the companies we've absorbed. We actually took $10 million of annual G&A out of the system by absorbing three of our competitors and completely absorbing their portfolio without absorbing any of the human resource costs of running those companies. Obviously, defrayed all of their listing costs and other public company costs by absorbing the companies and singularly focusing them within the company, Gold Royalty Corp. In other words, every dollar of incremental revenue growth goes right to the bottom line in terms of free cash flow generation. What kind of multiples do you apply to that? By the end of the decade, we're looking at close to 90% margins in our business, $80 million of revenue, of free cash flow, I should say, at current gold prices. Even if you apply a 20x multiple to that, which I think is reasonable for free cash flow multiples, you're looking at nearly a tripling in our share price just on that simple arithmetic. The other opportunity is to get a re-rate within our stock over and above applying a cash flow multiple or free cash flow multiple. If you look at the multiples and a price and net asset value that royalty companies typically trade at, they're vastly superior to the producers in the space because of the low underlying risk of our business. The diversification I mentioned earlier on, the fact that we don't have inflation risk, the fact that we have scalability, the fact that we have a much higher margin business than the producers have, typically means that the seniors in our sector, Franco-Nevada, Wheaton , and Royal Gold are typically trading at 2x-3x the underlying net asset value of their business. The smaller cap players are typically trading at one times because they don't have the scale the seniors have. As you can see, given that all of our royalties are completely bought and paid for, we're going to achieve significant scale organically over the course of the next five years. There's no reason we can't realize a significant re-rate in our multiple on a price and net asset value basis, commensurate with what we're seeing in the seniors because we're attaining that scale organically with the existing royalty portfolio. I will put up our assets, our key cornerstone assets, namely the three of the top five producing gold mines in North America, up against any of the assets that the seniors have in our sector. We have quality, we have low political risk, and we have embedded, completely bought-for growth within the portfolio. The other added dimension that's occurring in the space is consolidation. There's been significant consolidation among the royalty players. Most recently, Royal Gold announced the acquisition of Sandstorm. You can see both of them are on this graph. Sandstorm will disappear in the coming weeks. Elliott owns the majority of Triple Flag, and they also have taken a significant stake in the Osisko royalties. I expect they will probably catalyze some further consolidation among that mid-tier, which means that $1 billion- $10 billion market cap universe will be completely vacant if that occurs. That's an opportunity among the smaller cap players to create the next mid-tier champion to capture the attention of the market, get in that Goldilocks zone where you're big enough to be institutionally relevant to generalist investors, but still small enough to grow. As good as those senior companies are that get those superior multiples, they're great companies, blue chip portfolios, great cash flow. What they don't have is growth because they're too big. If we can offer that mid-tier, as I said, Goldilocks company in that $1 billion- $10 billion market cap universe, which will be left vacant with the consolidation that's currently underway, we think we can actually capture a multiple superior to the seniors because we can offer both liquidity for investors, but growth. That stands in stark contrast to the seniors in the space by offering that growth that they certainly can't offer. Jackie, maybe we can go to the pipeline and talk in a little bit more detail about the pipeline that we have. As I said, we have seven cash-flowing royalties. We have 14 in various stages of construction and development to provide that underpinning of growth of 360% growth in revenue in gold equivalent ounces, I should say, over the next five years. Obviously, unmitigated leverage of the gold price. If you believe in gold price fundamentals and the potential for the gold price to continue to go up, we offer that unmitigated leverage both to the gold price and exploration. We have another 40+ royalties in the advanced exploration stage, which are assets that actually have defined resources on them. Then we have pre-exploration stage or pre-resource stage assets, over 180 of those within the portfolio that provide optionality in good geological districts. Over 80% of our portfolio again is in Nevada, Quebec, and Ontario by number and value, which are perennially rated among the top five jurisdictions in the world for mineral potential, low political risk, and low regulatory risk. We have a very heavy concentration of assets within those key jurisdictions. We really are a pure gold play. If you look at our metal exposure, we're over 90% gold when you look at it as a percentage of our overall book value. Jurisdictionally, as I said, we're the heavy concentration in Canada and the U.S. where you have low regulatory risk and low permeability risk, but also an important rule of law. At the end of the day, a royalty company is just a collection of contracts. We're very particular about what jurisdictions we're in. We want to make sure we're in jurisdictions where we can enforce our contracts if we need to through the judicial system. From time to time, that happens. You have to be able to enforce those contracts. I can tell you when we have, we've been successful every time because we've been in jurisdictions that recognize the sanctity of our contracts. As you can see, we're very much oriented towards cash-flowing and near cash-flowing assets in terms of the underlying value of our business, but with significant free optionality in terms of those early stage royalties that we have. Since there are no holding costs of royalties, that optionality is infinite. We'll just hold on to those royalties forever, even if they're early stage, because they're in good jurisdictions near existing mines with strong, well-capitalized operators that can bring those royalties into fruition in very short order with the infrastructure they already have in place. Maybe just to provide you an overview of our trading, our capital structure, I think to end there before I open it up for questions. I've talked about some of our key assets, but as you can see here, we're well covered on the sell side. We have six analysts that cover us with a median target price of about $3.50 per share. That's actually come up quite significantly recently with both the gold price appreciation, but also because we are in that inflection point. That free cash flow that I talked about is being crystallized as we speak. The first six months of this year was our first period of positive free cash flow in our history. As you saw earlier on, that's expected to grow exponentially over the coming months just by volume, absent any increase in the gold price. We expect the volume of production, and over 80% of that growth is already built out and being ramped up. It's very low risk from the standpoint of development risk and construction risk. A lot of that construction risk is behind us. We expect that will result in significant share price appreciation, as I outlined a little earlier on in the presentation. We're a very liquid stock. We trade exclusively on NYSE American, in spite of the fact that we are a Canadian company, but we trade over 2 million shares a day. At current share prices, that would be north of $6 million of trading liquidity per day. That equates to about 90 days to turn our market cap. For a relatively small cap company, we're extremely liquid. That means you can build positions quickly, and when you're looking to crystallize the gains that you've realized, as many of our shareholders have recently, you can do so quite readily given the trading liquidity. We have very little debt on the balance sheet. We've drawn $27 million out of a $75 million line of credit that we have in place with Bank of Montreal and National Bank Financial. That's a three-year line of credit that doesn't mature until 2028. It's been an evergreen facility that we've continually extended, added on a year each and every year. It's always been a three-year facility. We do have a convertible debenture outstanding of $40 million, but that convertible is well in the money. We actually can force conversion in November of 2026. Given that it is in the money, we'll likely convert that, which means by the end of 2026, we expect to be completely debt-free as a result of the free cash flow generation we have and the conversion of those convertible debentures, which means that all of that cash flow growth is completely unmitigated by any carrying costs on our debt by the end of 2026. It is a well-capitalized company in great jurisdictions with great assets, great operating partners, and unmitigated exposure to both the gold price and the exploration being conducted by our operating partners. Again, over $200 million of exploration is being conducted on the underlying properties by our operating partners, completely off of their balance sheet. We get the full benefit of that upside without actually having to pay for it because all of our royalties are completely bought and paid for. That means that growth that I outlined is free growth without any capital burden whatsoever going forward. Michael, that's the story. Hopefully, this leaves enough time for some Q&A from your kind listeners today.
Terrific. In fact, we did get a lot of questions. Let me see if I can organize a few of them. I think the place that makes sense to begin is just with the growth of your current portfolio in terms of its production of gold. If I understood the chart right, we're looking at a roughly 5x increase in gold ounces produced just with no changes in the portfolio. That's just the mines you have and their growth, right?
That's correct. It's coming from mines that, as I said, over 80% of them are built, and they're just ramping up to full production. That's true, for example, in the case of Côté, which is Canada's second biggest producing gold mine, just started production last year, just ramping up to full capacity. It's already announced an expansion of production beyond what we had discounted in our valuation of that royalty when we bought it. Similarly, Canadian Malartic, which is operated by my old company, Agnico Eagle, is undertaking a $1.6 billion expansion of the existing operation that's been in production since 2011. That is largely built out as well, and they're ramping up the underground as they convert from an open pit to underground operation. Similarly, Ren, which is an underground extension of Goldstrike, Barrick's key asset in Nevada, they're ramping into the deposit as we speak. It's a low capital intensity, only a $400 million expansion. They've already spent about a third of the capital on that and expect to be in production as early as next year. Again, well-capitalized operators, good jurisdictions, infrastructure already in place in terms of not only road infrastructure, power, but also existing plants. They don't have to build a new surface plant. They're just leveraging the infrastructure, the industrial complex they already have in place. This is very low capital intensity, low risk growth that we have in the portfolio, already bought and paid for within our portfolio, delivering these volume of ounces. That does not take into consideration expansions that they're already considering on these assets because as they build out the infrastructure to operate these mines, they also get infrastructure to drill these deposits from underground. That affords them better access to look for brownfield opportunities for expanding the geological resource. Those expansions will ultimately and inevitably lead to expansions in production, which are not factored into our production volume. We see these production volumes as really the floor, not the ceiling.
Okay, terrific. The second place where I see potential valuation increases is just the leverage that you have to the price of gold. Obviously, gold prices are volatile. They can go down as well as up. If you could just kind of walk us through if gold prices took another 10% increase in price, what would that mean to the NPV of Gold Royalty?
In rough dollar terms, every $10 increase in the gold price by the end of the decade would equal, at 30,000 gold equivalent ounces, $300,000 of incremental revenue. It would fall right to the bottom line. I'm just using round terms. We're not quite at 30,000 oz, but very close to it. For illustration purposes, that's the kind of leverage we offer on a $10 increase in the gold price. You're right, gold prices are volatile, but I would say over a 50-year horizon, it's been a one-way trade. You look at what's happened to the gold price since we abandoned the gold standard in the early 1970s. Gold's gone from $35 an ounce to $3,500 an ounce, a hundred-fold increase in the gold price. What's happened to the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar? For that matter, any fiat currency globally, purchasing power's gone down about 99% over that period of time. It's a very linear relationship. Certainly, yes, there's a lot of volatility in the interim in the gold price because it's a freely trading commodity and there's a lot of buyers and sellers. That's the definition of a true liquid commodity like gold. Over a long time, a rise in gold has gone in only one direction. I would argue that we're just beginning because if you look at the debt burden we've taken on globally as governments, as businesses, as individuals, that's grown exponentially since the last time we saw a big gold run in the 1970s when we last had an inflation cycle. The global debt to GDP is now 350%. Back in the 1970s, it was only 100%. What that tells you is the Federal Reserve, and for that matter, central banks globally, have very limited latitude to raise interest rates to deal with inflation. They're going to have to let it ride. They're going to have to continue to expand money supply as they have been unabated since the great financial crisis in 2008 and will continue to do so because there's no fiscally responsible way to repay that debt. They have to inflate it away. The purchasing power of fiat currencies will continue to be degraded and gold is the one currency that can't be printed. In fact, there's a remarkable inelasticity of gold supply to price because reserves in the ground among the producers globally have gone down 40% in the last 12 years because the industry has not had access to general equity markets. They haven't had the capital to replace depleting reserves. They haven't conducted the necessary exploration. It's become an existential crisis for the producers who've had to consolidate with each other to sustain unsustainable production levels. What that means is the big guys in our producer universe have done nothing but grow their share count over the last 30 years. They haven't grown production in reserves.
Okay, it's interesting. Just one more question, or perhaps two before we need to close out. You have all that revenue growth in your forecast. You just hit positive cash flow. We would assume it would get larger going forward. Would you think that you might be returning some of that cash to shareholders at some point, or what are your plans?
No, it's an excellent question. As I said earlier on, we expect to be completely debt-free by the end of next year, given our free cash flow generation, the fact that our convertibles, even our warrants, are well in the money as well. We're in a position to actually have a very well-capitalized balance sheet by the end of next year and return capital to shareholders in various forms, whether it's a share buyback if our valuation continues to be depressed as it is now, or looking at returns of capital in the form of dividends. At the end of the day, this is a collection of annuities. Why wouldn't we share that annuity with shareholders?
Makes sense. Just again, kind of thinking about the big picture of your industry, of course, it's harder and harder to find high-grade deposits. If we look across your portfolio, how would you characterize the average grade of the mine?
I would say typical with the industry average, which is around 1 g/ ton for those that follow the sector. The important thing is we're in very large-scale operations with economies of scale. A great example of this are the two large open pit operations in Canada that we have royalties on, two of the three biggest producing gold mines in Canada, which is Canadian Malartic and Côté. They are large-scale open pit operations, heavily automated, economies of scale with large tonnage moved on a daily basis, which drives economies of scale. These are big operations with well-capitalized operators that help mitigate the cost. Cost is not a concern for us. Costs can inflate, and certainly mining companies are not immune from cost inflation we're experiencing in the general economy. They face the same inflationary pressures that we all face on our day-to-day lives. Because of the nature of our model, the fact that we have top-line exposure, we're completely insulated from that risk.
Okay, terrific. That's probably where we should close out. We're right at the end of our time. Thanks very much for joining us. A very interesting presentation, and everyone in the audience, thank you for joining as well. If we missed your question, I think I got to everybody, perhaps on a consolidated basis, but if we missed your question, please let your representative know and we'll track down an answer for you. Thanks again, everyone, for joining us, and we'll look forward to seeing you next time.