It certainly is an exciting time in the precious metals industry, as we know. Thanks to the Denver Gold Group for allowing us to come and present to you again, and for your interest here today. I will be making some forward-looking statements during the presentation. I just ask you to be familiar with our safe harbor statement here. The presentation's available on our website. I'll also mention that the Royal Gold management team will be hosting an investor update next week on April the 17th, and feel free to join if you'd like. The details are on the website there, if you'd like to dial in and listen to that.
So over the next 20, 15, 20 minutes or so, I'd like to share some of the key aspects of the Royal Gold story with you. I'll start with a brief overview of the company. We talk about optionality a lot in our portfolio, and I wanna give you some examples in our portfolio about what that exactly means. I'll also share a view on the business development environment. That's where I spend most of my time with the company. I'll give you a sense of where we are right now in the market. We'll talk about how we approach growth with a couple of slides, and then I wanna conclude with why we think Royal Gold is an interesting company, both for generalist and, and specialist investors, and there are a few slides there I wanna share with you as well.
So for those that may not be as familiar with the Royal Gold story, this is a snapshot of the company. We are a mine finance and portfolio management company. We focus on making perpetual royalty and stream investments. Streaming consists of about 70% of our revenue. Royalties make up the balance. That's shown on the left-hand side with the pie chart there. Our current portfolio is very broad. We have 177 properties currently across 17 countries. Almost 40 of those are currently producing, and our strategy is very simple. We're focused on precious metals, primarily gold. Gold represents about 75% of our revenue. It's among the highest in the streaming royalty industry.
Silver adds another 9%-10% of the revenue, and copper, which is also unique for us, adds another 10%-12%, depending on the price. We've been listed on the NASDAQ Exchange for more than 40 years, and we continue to deliver strong operating and financial results. The numbers on the right-hand side are from last year, 2023. We have a strong balance sheet. We are highly efficient in terms of the model, and that supports an $8 billion U.S. market cap right now with just 30 employees in the company, so very efficient. Those employees are across 4 offices. So our current portfolio, shown here on this map, it's very broad, it's global, it's weighted towards mining-friendly regions, as you can see.
Our principal properties on the right-hand side, that's where the bulk of our revenue comes from. It's a mix of both royalties and streams. And then we hold an additional 140 investments beyond these producing properties at various stages of development. All of these are bought and paid for, and all have the potential to come online and produce at some point in the future. So this just provides layers and layers of optionality for shareholders at no additional cost. Our portfolio is also very well-diversified by region, by mine, and by the type of mine, as shown on this slide here.
Historically, our product has been used for arbitrage, taking precious metal byproducts out of a base metal asset, but our product is also used for primary gold assets, and in our portfolio, primary gold assets represent about 60% of the portfolio. So I think what this shows is the flexibility of the product. It can be used for primary gold assets, for project developments, as well as that traditional arbitrage byproduct to fund a development project in the base metal sector as well. So although our business model is such that we don't take direct ownership of projects, ESG has been a key focus for us.
It's a core part of our business, and we do invest in the long term, so we need to make sure that our investments are sustainable over the long period, and it's a key part of our diligence, as I mentioned, both on new transactions, but also managing the current portfolio after the transaction has been announced. And this isn't new. We've been working on this for many years, but what we have worked on is to improve the transparency around these processes, and we're pleased to see the material improvements in the perception and recognition of our practices. And I've shown two diagrams here, MSCI and Sustainalytics. These are two well-known rating providers, and you can see that we rank very well with both of those organizations.
We'll also have out our 2023 ESG report, likely in the next week or so. I think one of the key differentiators for Royal Gold is our relative size in the market, and that's what this chart here is showing, market cap of Royal Gold's next to the peer group with the bar charts, and then looking at the cash flow from last year in the circles. You can see that Royal Gold generates significant cash flow compared to our peer group, and we can certainly compete with the larger peers from a funding of larger transaction perspective.
We have access to low-cost capital, so not only can we compete with the larger peers, but we can go downmarket and compete for smaller opportunities, given our relative cost of capital advantage as well. The typical size of a stream transaction in our market is between $100 million and $300 million. It's very rare to find a $500 million or a $1 billion transaction. And so when we add in a $200 million opportunity, or in the case shown here, Khoemacau, which is a silver stream we acquired in Botswana in 2019 at $265 million, that can show material growth in our portfolio. I don't think that's the case for our larger peers. I think it's more difficult to show growth.
So I think when we look at our business, and certainly on this diagram here, I think we are in the sweet spot among the peer group in terms of being competitive. Just finally, on valuation, and, and we have re-rated in the last few weeks, like most of our peers, with the gold price moving higher, but on a price to net asset value, there's still more room to, to move higher versus where we've traded in the past, and we are attractive on a price to cash flow basis, as you can see on the, on the right-hand side. So let's look more closely at the lower risk exposure to gold, to, to resource optionality that I mentioned, and also, the limited exposure that we have to inflation, that Royal Gold offers.
And I'm gonna walk through a few slides here to make these points. This slide here summarizes the various investments that one can make in gold, and I've compared that here to Royal Gold at the top. All of these investments provide exposure to the gold price, but unlike an investment in physical gold, Royal Gold provides both exploration upside and the potential for properties in the current portfolio to enter into production at no incremental cost. Unlike an investment in an operating company, what you get with Royal Gold is, you don't take, or we don't take direct exposure to operating and capital costs as well. We also offer a growing and sustainable dividend, and I'm gonna come back to that at the end of the presentation.
There's a slide I wanna share with you in terms of our track record. So as I mentioned, I think a fundamental part of our business model is providing shareholders with exposure to reserve and resource growth at no cost, at no incremental cost, and I think that's a key reason why our shares command a premium in the market. As you saw, we traded close to two times net asset value. I wanna share two examples in our portfolio to kinda make this point. The first is Pueblo Viejo, or PV. It's an operation in the Dominican Republic owned by... It's a joint venture, Barrick and Newmont, that's on the left side, and on the right side is the Wassa Mine in Ghana.
We made stream investments in these assets in 2015, and in both cases, if you add the potential resource conversions to the current reserves, you can see, so comparing the far left bar, which were the reserves when we made the investments, to the far right bar, which are the current reserves, plus the optionality in terms of resource, you can see that they're both higher than when we made those investments nine years ago. Through the delivery of metal as part of the stream contracts, we recovered 85% of our initial investment at PV, and we recovered more than 140% of the investment at Wassa, and both of these assets have many years of production in front of them. There's an expansion underway right now at PV. The operator, Barrick, is ramping up that expansion.
They're gonna look to maintain the gold production to the mid-2040s. And at Wassa, the most recent study there showed the resource potential to support an additional 11-year mine life beyond the current reserve life. So again, we don't have to put any further money into these assets to participate in that upside. So I'm gonna look at cost structure, obviously very topical right now in the mining industry. And what we've shown here is a comparison of our cost structure for Royal Gold, these are the bar charts, against the average cost structure for producers in the industry, and it's done on a per-ounce basis. And I think there are two key takeaways here to highlight.
The first is, on a per-ounce basis, you can see that our cost structure is materially lower than the producers, and that just means a higher margin business all around. I think the second point to highlight here is only a small portion of our costs, which are mainly related to cash G&A, from the offices, from employees, and so forth, that's the only part of our cost structure that's actually subject to inflation, and that's broken out on the right-hand side in the pie chart, if you want some more detail there. But if you look at the producer side, they have many more costs that are exposed to inflation, labor, energy, other inputs that go into a mining operation.
So in the absence of higher commodity prices to offset inflation, you get in, you get erosion of the margin, whereas with Royal Gold, our margins are much more stable over the cycle as a result. So how has optionality and looking at the resource growth and our acquisition history, how has that really played out in the performance of our shares? And that's what this chart here is showing. You can see that our share price has outperformed gold, it's outperformed the GDX index and the general market indices going back to when the GDX was created in 2006.
Our beta versus gold is around 1.9, so that shows great leverage for specialist investors, but it also is low versus the broad market, and sometimes general investors want that diversification, and that's what a low beta would offer. So we can appeal to both types of investors as a result. So I'm gonna turn to business development now. As I mentioned, this is where I spend most of my time with the company, and I'm gonna share two or three slides here with you, just to give you a sense of where the market is. This slide is the history of the streaming market going back over the last 20 years or so.
It's on a dollar value of deployed capital on an annual basis, and the use of proceeds are broken out on the right-hand side in the pie chart. I think it's fair to say that streaming has become an accepted and common form of financing. Most CFOs will look at streaming as they look at the various options to finance a project. It's very flexible, it can be used for project development, for balance sheet repair, for M&A, and what that means is it gives us a very consistent pipeline of opportunities to review at any one time. We know that this sector always needs capital. It's a great outcome for a company like ours, and... At the moment, you can see that the majority of the use of proceeds are going towards project development.
With this environment we're in right now, projects are moving forward. We're very busy in terms of looking at ways that we can finance projects into production. We were very active in the business development side in 2021 and 2022 in terms of announced transactions. We deployed $1.2 billion of capital into 6 material transactions, 5 royalties and one stream. All of these were very consistent with our strategy, about 95% collectively towards gold in terms of the weighting, and most were over producing assets in Canada and the U.S. It also improved duration and counterparty quality in our portfolio. We focus on those things strategically, and so we're happy to see that outcome as well. We acquire these assets without issuing any equity at all.
We used our revolving credit facility and the cash on hand that we had as well. Although we were very busy with looking at opportunities in 2023, we didn't transact. We were very patient. We didn't see the right opportunities. We passed. And while we were being patient, we were paying down debts, and we built out our liquidity, and I'll show you something in a slide or two that highlights that. So just to take a step back and look at the Royal Gold acquisition history with this slide here, and it ties into what I just mentioned about not transacting in 2023. This shows our single asset acquisitions going back over the last two decades. We've deployed about $4 billion into the market.
So on average, it's about one transaction every year or so, and you can see that it tends to be very lumpy. It's a function of the market. We can't predict when these opportunities are going to come up and when we can transact, so you have to be very patient in our industry. And certainly 2023, we looked at maybe 100 opportunities we didn't transact. We just didn't see the right opportunity to go forward with. And so it's a very disciplined diligence process that we embark on, and as I said, we've passed on many opportunities as a result. So how do we approach growth? For a couple slides here I wanna share with you, we approach it from the view of how do we generate accretion for our shareholders over the long term?
There are a couple of, I think, compelling charts here to share with you, starting with this one here. This is a cumulative view of our results going back to the year 2000. What you can see here is revenue and cash flow growth have far exceeded the increase in our G&A expense, as well as the increase in the gold price. We've largely financed our growth without really an increase in our share count. Our last equity raise was in 2012, and so I think when you see operating cash flow increases of almost 100 times and shares outstanding only increased by four times, that's really delivering per share growth to shareholders.
Delivering on that growth, well, we need to have a strong balance sheet at all times to be ready to transact. That's what this slide here is showing. We prioritize funding with our growth—for our growth with existing cash flow and cash flow from operations, followed by debt. We have a billion-dollar revolver, revolving credit facility in place, and then we will look at equity, if needed. We currently have, or as of the end of 2023, $850 million of available liquidity, and as we've done in the past, you expect us to consistently pay down the debt. Right now, or again, at the end of 2023, we had $250 million of debt outstanding.
We expect to repay that in full in the second half of this year, absent any significant business development opportunities that, that may arise. So I just wanna conclude here with a few slides here to show some of the qualities of why we think Royal Gold is a unique investment. We've already talked about the relative size in the market, Royal Gold versus the peer group, and we don't have the same challenges to grow as certainly some of our larger peers. But I think there are four additional reasons that I wanted to, to share with you. The first is, we are the only U.S.-domiciled royalty and streaming company, and if you look at us and Newmont, we're the only larger cap precious metal companies that are, that are based in the U.S.
And as a result of that, Royal Gold is included in more than 200 indices in the U.S., so we really appeal to a broad range of investors as a result. Secondly, we have the lowest share count in the GDX index at roughly 66 million shares, and we've existed for more than 40 years. And I think looking at the average or the median right now, the GDX index, I think it's around 455 million shares outstanding on the median. Thirdly, we hold the record for the number of consecutive annual dividend increases among the GDX members, and we've been added to the S&P High Yield Dividend Aristocrats Index in early 2022.
As a result of that track record of growing a sustainable and growing dividend, we're the only precious metals company in that index, and we're sitting alongside of other high-quality companies like IBM, Coca-Cola, Caterpillar, and others as well. So we feel like we're in good company in that index. Finally, it's a very high-margin business, and looking at our 2023 results with this chart here, we achieved an almost 80% EBITDA margin. Our cash G&A was just 5% of revenue, and it's a very scalable business. And I mentioned that growth in 2021, 2022, $1.2 billion. We didn't have to hire anybody.
We didn't have to scale up our business in any way, and we were able to add that growth to transact and also manage that growth after the transaction with the group of people that we already had in place. So, a very scalable and unique business from that perspective. Coming up to the conclusion here, another slide or two, just to highlight, I mentioned this at the beginning, about our history of dividend growth. This goes back to the year 2000. 16% compounded annual growth rate. We're not targeting a specific payout ratio or yield, but just a very consistent, sustainable dividend, and we expect that this is going to continue in terms of the track record. Andrew, I know I'm almost out of time, but I'll just throw this up here.
These are some of the potential upcoming catalysts that we're looking forward to in the portfolio. It includes Côté Gold, IAMGOLD's project, which I think the first gold pour was about a week ago or so. We have a royalty there. The Manh Choh project in Alaska, that's owned by Kinross. First production is expected later this year. Some more news coming out of Cortez and the Goldr ush asset. And then looking into next year and beyond, there's things in the portfolio that will come to light for us in a game. We're not paying anything incremental to see this growth come online. And with that, Andrew, I'll leave it there. I think I've only got maybe a minute or so.
We have a minute if anybody has a quick question. If not, maybe, Dan, I could ask, you talked about streaming becoming kind of an accepted form of financing and part of, you know, the financing strategy for a lot of development projects with, you know, the gold price where it is. Presumably, you're evaluating a lot of opportunities. What do you look for in development projects that make it-
Yeah
a worthwhile investment for Royal Gold?
Yeah. Rarely are we the only source of capital. We need functioning markets. We need the equity markets to be working. We usually work with equity and senior project finance, and then the stream will be part of the capital stack. So we need those markets to be working. But what we look for, we look at things you would think we should look for: quality operators, can they build? Can they operate the mine sustainably? We look for optionality is a really key feature for us. As I just went through with the deck there, we wanna make sure that we're not just buying into what the resource is today, but what it could be in the future. That's why we can offer low cost of capital today, and we hope in 10, 20 years, that more resources come in, and we can participate on the upside there.
Presumably, times are busy.
Times are busy. Yes. Yeah, it's been busy. It's, I mean, it's been busy for us for the last number of years, and certainly right today, I think with the commodity prices, the way that they are, projects are moving forward. And I think the equity markets are opening up, and that's good. That's good for us. It's good to see projects move forward.
Absolutely. Bodes well for good news ahead. Dan, thank you very much for the presentation.
Thanks, Andrew. Appreciate it.