We appreciate you hosting the session again. Thanks very much. We also appreciate being here on behalf of the Denver Gold Group. Thank you for the invitation again to share the Royal Gold story with you. I appreciate your interest. I'm going to go through a number of slides, and we'll save some time for Q&A at the end of the presentation. It certainly has been a very interesting time in the gold industry for lots of reasons since we were here a year ago. This does not want to move forward here, Andrew, for some reason. I can't seem to advance the slides.
There we go. Sorry about that. I will be making forward-looking statements throughout the presentation. I just ask you to be familiar with our Safe Harbor Statement. Our presentation is available on our website if you want to go through some more of the detail afterwards. Over the next 15 minutes or so, I want to share the Royal Gold story with you. I want to start with an overview of our company. You might not be as familiar with it. I want to talk about optionality in our portfolio. We often talk about this as a key driver of our share price and premium multiple.
I want to give you a couple of examples of what that means in our portfolio. I'll give you a view of the current business development environment. That's where I spend most of my time with the company. We're very busy right now. Neil made comments about that earlier. I agree. It's one of the busier times that we've seen in my career. I want to talk about how we approach growth in general as a company. I want to conclude by making the case as to why Royal Gold is a compelling investment for both generalists and specialist investors.
Some key points here that differentiate our story from some of the other peers. I have a few slides to speak to that. To start with, this is a high-level snapshot of our company, Royal Gold. We are a mine finance and portfolio management company. We are really focused on making perpetual royalty and stream investments primarily in gold. We have two business segments: streams and royalties. Streams were roughly 70% of our revenue last year. Royalties accounted for the balance. As you can see, our portfolio is very broad. We have 175 investments around 17 countries. More than 40 of those investments are currently producing.
Almost 60% of our revenue in 2024 came from what we call low-risk jurisdictions, so the US, Canada, and Australia. Our strategy is really focused on precious metals, in particular gold. Gold accounted for more than 75% of our revenue last year. It's the highest percentage among our larger peers in the streaming and royalty sector. Silver was roughly 10% of our revenue, and copper accounted for about 12% or so of last year's revenue. We are listed on the Nasdaq Exchange. We're the only US-domiciled royalty and streaming company.
We're included in more than 200 US indices. We have a very, very broad appeal. We have the lowest share count in the GDX index by a wide margin, and that's impressive for a company that's been around for more than 40 years. We continue to deliver strong operating and financial results, and those are shown for last year on the right-hand side. We recorded record revenue, operating cash flow, and earnings. We have a strong balance sheet, highly efficient model, and that supports an almost $11 billion US market cap today with just 29 employees across four offices.
I want to speak to the relative size as a differentiator for Royal Gold among the peer group with this chart. The bars show the market caps of Royal Gold alongside the peer group, and the circles are the operating cash flows for last year. You can see Royal Gold generates significant operating cash flows, and when you add that to our undrawn revolving credit facility, we'll talk about that in a moment, which is $1 billion. It provides ample liquidity for us to compete with our peer group.
We have a premium multiple in the market that indicates low cost of capital. We'll look at that in a moment as well. We are very well positioned to compete with our peer group. The typical size of transaction in our industry has historically been between $100 million and $300 million or so. The $500 million, the billion-dollar deals, these are pretty rare in our industry. When we put that size of transaction, say a $200 million, $250 million transaction in our portfolio, it's material. I think our larger peers, it's less so. It's harder to move the needle in our sector.
We are kind of in a sweet spot, if you will, in the royalty streaming market. Our current portfolio producing investments is global. It's weighted towards mining-friendly jurisdictions, as shown on the map. Our principal properties are listed on the right-hand side. They're the larger portfolio assets that contribute a bit more than half of our revenue last year. They're a mix of streams and royalties. We hold more than 130 other investments beyond the producing properties that are in various stages of development, I should say, beyond the producing assets.
These are all bought and paid for, and they all have the potential to come online and produce at no incremental cost to our shareholders. It just provides layers and layers of optionality over the long term in the portfolio. Although the model is really geared around not having direct operating control or taking operatorship in general of mines, we are very focused on investment stewardship as a core aspect of our business.
We do invest in the long term, and so we need to ensure the sustainability of our investments over the long term. It's a key part of our diligence, whether we're looking at a new investment or we're trying to manage our current portfolio. We take this as a very serious component of our day-to-day work. It's not new, but what we've tried to do is improve the transparency around these processes. We are very pleased to see the material improvements in perception and recognition of our work that we've been doing, in particular over the last five years or so.
MSCI and Sustainalytics are two well-regarded rating agencies. You can see we rank very well with both of these, and we'll be putting out our 2024 Investment Stewardship Report in the coming weeks. It'll be on our website as well. Finally, from an evaluation perspective, and I want to just touch on this, and I'm going to come back to it a little bit later as well, but we have been re-rating with the gold prices. You'd hope that would happen in the last number of weeks with the higher gold price. We see more room for our multiples, trading multiples, to move higher.
We've seen them higher in the past, as you can see. We think as momentum continues and we deliver on our portfolio and good results going forward, we expect that these multiples will continue to re-rate. Let's look more closely now at the lower risk exposure to gold and to resource optionality and to the limited exposure to inflation that Royal Gold provides. I'm going to walk through two or three slides that will make this point for you.
This slide summarizes the various types of gold investments that investors can participate in alongside of Royal Gold. All these investments provide exposure to gold. Unlike an investment in physical gold, Royal Gold provides both exposure to the upside in our portfolio and the potential for properties in the current portfolio to enter into production at no incremental cost. Unlike an investment in an operating company, we do not take on direct exposure to operating and capital cost increases. We also offer a growing and sustainable dividend.
We are going to come back to that later in the presentation as well as a key differentiator for Royal Gold. A fundamental part of our business model is to provide shareholders with exposure to reserve and resource growth at no incremental cost. We think that is a key reason why our shares command a premium in the marketplace. I want to give you a couple of examples on this slide. Pueblo Viejo, or PV, is an operation in the Dominican Republic. It is on the left side. The Wassa Mine in Ghana is on the right-hand side.
We made stream investments in these assets in 2015. In both cases, adding potential resource conversions to the current reserves are higher than the reserves were back when we made these investments 10 years ago. Through deliveries under the stream agreements, we have recovered almost 100% of our investments at PV and 170% of our investment at Wassa. There is potential at both these assets going forward. At PV, Barrick Gold is the operator. They continue to ramp up an expansion to grow production from roughly 600,000 ounces last year to 800,000 ounces in 2028.
They are targeting to keep that production level going forward into the mid-2040s. At Wassa, the most recent study published indicated that the resources could support a mine life for an incremental 11 years beyond the current reserve life. All this can happen without us having to put any further capital into either of these investments. We just get to participate in the upside going forward for our shareholders. I want to talk about the cost structure a little bit with this slide. This is the cost structure of Royal Gold with the bar on the left-hand side.
That is put against the cost structure, the average cost structure of producers in the industry. It is on a per-ounce basis. I think there are two key takeaways here that you can see. The first is our cost per ounce is materially lower than that of the producers. That just means a higher margin business overall. Secondly, only a small portion of our cost, really just the cash G&A related to our employees, is subject to inflation. We've kind of broken that out with the pie chart on the right-hand side, where producers are much more exposed to those kinds of costs.
You think about labor, energy, other inputs that have all been exposed to the inflation cycle that we've seen in the last number of years. In the absence of higher commodity prices, the higher inflation erodes those margins on the operator side, whereas margins for Royal Gold, they tend to be very stable and very stable through the cycle of the mining industry. How has the optionality to the gold price and resource growth in our acquisition history, how has that been reflected in our performance? That is what we're showing with this slide.
It shows that our share price has outperformed gold, the GDX index, and the general market indices since the GDX was formed back in 2006. We have a beta of roughly 1.8 versus gold, so lots of leverage for specialist investors. We also have a low beta versus the broad market for diversification for general investors that are looking for that kind of investment. I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about the business development market. Again, that's where I spend most of my time. I want to start with this slide.
This is the history of the streaming market going back over the last 20 years or so. It is a dollar volume transaction on an annual basis with the bar chart, and then the cumulative use of proceeds with the pie chart on the right-hand side. Streaming, as Neil mentioned, streaming is now very much a mainstream form of financing, and we're very busy as a result of that. It's a very flexible product. It can be used for project development, for strengthening balance sheets, for M&A work. It really fits the needs of the market across cycles in a sector where we all know the sector is hungry for capital at all times.
It provides us with a really consistent pipeline of opportunities to look at as a result. Primary use of proceeds right now is really going towards project development. I think what's happened is the higher commodity prices are giving confidence to operators to move projects forward. We've all seen a lot of bought-deal equity financings that are happening. That money is going into projects, and it's just creating lots of opportunities for mine finance companies like Royal Gold to look at going forward. We will just take a step back with this slide and look at our acquisition history again over the last 20 years or so.
It shows our single asset acquisitions have totaled a bit more than $4 billion in that period of time. On average, if you average us out, it's roughly one to two transactions a year. It tends to be very lumpy, as you can see. It's really hard for us to predict when opportunities are going to come our way, and it really requires a patient perspective and approach in our industry. In the last five years, we've deployed roughly $1.6 billion of capital into royalty and stream investments. These have been very consistent with our strategy.
Those combined acquisitions were weighted towards gold and over producing assets in the US and Canada. They also improved our duration and counterparty quality. We think about those things strategically as we look at new investments. We acquired all of this growth without having to issue any equity. We used our revolving credit facility and working capital and cash from cash generation as well. How do we approach growth? I want to talk about this in the next couple of slides as we think about growth, being patient and looking for accretion for our shareholders over the long term.
This chart shows the cumulative view of our financial results going back to the year 2000. You can see revenue and cash flow growth have far exceeded the increase in our G&A expenses and the increase in the gold price. We have largely financed our growth without a significant increase in our share count. Our last equity raise was in 2012. When you see operating cash flow increases of 125 times and shares outstanding have just grown by four times, we are delivering accretive growth to our shareholders. I want to touch on our revolving credit facility with this slide.
It is a very flexible financing tool that we do deploy. We have used it over the last number of years for financing growth. The key takeaway of this slide is the consistency that we have demonstrated to pay down the revolver when we have drawn funds for acquisitions. Our business is really well suited for debt. We borrow to acquire interest that, in many cases, will produce for multi-decades. Yet we are able to pay off that debt in just a few quarters, given our strong cash flow.
It is a great tool to use, and we use it quite often. Delivering on that growth also just means a generally strong balance sheet and being ready to transact at any time when those opportunities come our way. The way that we prioritize our financing is, first and foremost, cash and cash from operations. Then we look at the revolving credit facility that we just saw on the previous slide. Finally, we will consider equity if it is accretive as well. Liquidity at the end of last year was roughly $1.2 billion and no debt outstanding on our revolver.
I want to conclude by sharing with you a few aspects that make our story unique from our perspective in the market. We have already looked at the relative size of Royal Gold versus the peers. We just do not have the same challenges to grow versus some of our larger peers. First, our model is highly efficient and scalable. We generated more than $700 million of revenue last year. I touched on the market cap of almost $11 billion, fewer than 30 employees. The charts here show that this is by enterprise value and total revenue metrics per employee.
You can see Royal Gold compares very well versus the large mining companies across the sector. We also compare very well against some of the most highly valued tech companies on these metrics as well. It is a scalable business. I mentioned that $1.6 billion of growth in the last five years. We did not need to add any new resources to either acquire that growth or manage that growth going forward. Second, Royal Gold is a very high margin business. For 2024, we achieved an EBITDA margin of more than 80%.
Also, our cash G&A was just 4% of revenue, and that is a lower percentage than we saw the previous year. It just reflects our stable cost structure and the margin growth that we've been able to demonstrate. Finally, our dividend history is a differentiator for Royal Gold. Dividends have grown at a 15% annual compounded annual growth rate since 2000. Royal Gold holds the record for the most consecutive number of annual dividend increases among the GDX members. We became a member of the S&P High Yield Dividend Aristocrats Index in 2022 as a result of this track record.
We're the only precious metals company in that index, and we're sitting alongside other high-quality companies that you'll know well, like Coca-Cola, IBM, and Caterpillar. We're not targeting a specific payout ratio or a yield, but just a consistent increase in the dividend, which we expect will continue to grow over time. Finally, what are we excited about at Royal Gold? Our portfolio is full of potential catalysts this year and beyond. I'll just mention one in particular, which is Mount Milligan. Mount Milligan is where we have our largest investment.
We have a gold stream and a copper stream there. It's operated by Centerra Gold. It's in British Columbia. Centerra is working on a PFS that is expected to come out in the second half of this year. What they're looking to achieve is to extend the mine life from the current 2035, 2036 timeframe much longer than that. That could be very good for Royal Gold. We look forward to seeing that study. There are other potential catalysts and principal properties and royalties shown here, but I won't go into the detail. I'll pause there, and maybe we can turn to Q&A, Andrew. I'm not sure how much time I have left.
There's a couple of minutes for questions, if there's any questions in the audience. There's one up at the front here.
Yeah, just as a layman, I'm seeing that the streaming and the other activities, Royal Gold, very niche-orientated in mining. Why are not the investment banks actually doing this business themselves? You're actually getting funding from these investment banks , and then you're furtherly going on and giving it to the end recipient. Is there just a dearth of talent there in the investment banks ? What are you doing that the investment banks can't do?
Yeah, I just want to think about that for a moment. The investment banks are part of the process, and in part because our product has become more mainstream. When a CFO is looking at financing a transaction or an acquisition, they'll look at equity, debt, and they'll look at alternative funding, including streams and royalties. There is typically a process that's run. The investment banks are hired, and they'll manage a process on behalf of the company that's looking for that capital. Is your question related more to what?
Why aren't they actually—they're being hired. Why aren't they providing the capital? Because at the end of the day, they're giving you capital to give to them.
Yeah. The way that the model works is you need to take a very, very long-term perspective beyond what a normal debt's payout would look like, say, over five, six, seven years. In some cases, we're not getting a return on our principal for 10, 15 years or even beyond. What we're trying to do is, in the long term, see that optionality show up in the portfolio in that asset where the mine life gets extended and we benefit down the road from that. Banks can't really take that duration risk. It's quite different.
I think we have one other question just over there on the left.
Good morning, Dan.
Hi, Michael.
Same question as earlier. What makes a stream or royalty asset a better fit for Royal Gold than it would for Franco or Wheaton?
Yeah, I think we view ourselves as being creative. I'm not saying that the other groups are not creative, but we've been able to demonstrate some creativity around structures, in particular, really listening to operators. An example of that is we made an investment in an asset in Brazil called Xavantina. It's owned by Ero Copper. Made that in 2021. They wanted to put more money to really drill the asset out further and explore. They didn't have a lot of money back then. We offered a structure that would allow them to do that.
Of course, we would benefit if they were able to grow the resource base, which they were able to do. We developed a partnership with them. They liked the structure. We just announced further financing that went into that asset here in the last few days because of that partnership. We're now able to extend our stream rate longer in that asset as well. I think creativity, Michael, is one way that we differentiate ourselves.
Okay, thank you, Dan.