To be familiar with our safe harbor statement. This presentation is available on our website. I also want to mention that we will have our investor day on April the twentieth. We invite you to join. It will start at 9:30 A.M. Eastern Time, run for about three hours or so. The entire management team will be available to answer questions for you. Over the next 15 minutes or so, I'd like to share some of the key aspects of the Royal Gold story with you. I wanna give you a brief overview of the company. I wanna talk a little bit about what we've delivered to our shareholders in the last 18 months or so. We've been quite busy. I also wanna talk about optionality.
We talk about this quite often with investors, but what does that actually mean beyond commodity prices? I wanna give you some examples in our portfolio that shows that. I will also provide a view on the business development environment. That's where I spend most of my time right now is on BD, and how we think about growth and approach growth in general. Then I wanna make the case for Royal Gold, this unique company for you to consider, whether you're a generalist or specialist in-investor. For those that may not be as familiar with the Royal Gold story, this slide here provides a high-level snapshot. We are a mine finance and portfolio management company. We have a focus on making perpetual royalty and stream investments.
Streaming consists y ou can see the pie chart on the left-hand side. Streaming consists of about 70% of our revenue. The balance is coming from royalties. Our current portfolio is very broad. We have 182 properties or investments currently across 12 countries, of which 40 are producing. Our strategy is very focused on precious metals, gold in particular. Almost 75% of our revenue comes from gold. If you add silver on top of that's another 12% of balance that's coming from copper. We've been listed on the Nasdaq exchange for more than 40 years. We continue to deliver on strong operating financial results. That set of numbers on the right-hand side, that's from 2022. We achieved the upper end of our guidance range for gold equivalent ounce or GEO production, 335,000 ounces.
We have a strong balance sheet. We're highly efficient in terms of model. Our current market capitalization is around $9 billion, and we have just 31 employees in the company across four offices. Our current portfolio of producing investments is global, and it's weighted towards mine-friendly regions, as you can see here with this map. The principal properties are listed on the right-hand side. Those are the main or larger portfolio investments that we have. They generate the bulk of the revenue for the company, and they're a mix of both royalties and streams. We hold an additional 142 investments or properties beyond these producing investments shown here at various stages of development. All of those are bought and paid for. All of those have the potential to produce one day in the portfolio.
This just provides layers of optionality in the portfolio for investors without shareholders having to pay additional costs to get access to that kind of optionality. Our portfolio is also well diversified. We talked about the region regionally already on the left-hand side, but also by mine in the center pie chart, and also by the type of the underlying mine, as shown on the right-hand side. Historically, our product has been used mainly to arbitrage precious metal byproducts in base metal assets, but our product is also used over primary gold assets. In our case, those represent about 80% of the underlying mines in our portfolio. That's shown on the right-hand side. I think what this really shows is the flexibility of our products.
We can be in a very attractive form of financing for a primary gold asset, as an example. We see all those kinds of opportunities quite often. Although our business model does not involve direct operating control, ESG is a key or core part of our business strategy. We do invest in the long term, as I mentioned, so we need to ensure that the sustainability of our investments are carried out, and it's a key part of our diligence.
We look at new investments in this light, as well as what's in the portfolio already. It's not new, but what we've done more recently is we've tried to improve the transparency or the disclosure. You can see the trend here. We've shown Sustainalytics and MSCI. These are two well-known rating providers, and you can see the improvement over time that we've been able to show the market. We'll also be releasing our 2022 ESG reports in the next few days and encourage you to have a look at that.
We had a number of achievements last year, and they're listed here. There's actually quite a few of them to go through, but what I'd like to do is just focus on three I think that stand out in my mind. The first is we deployed more than $900 million in acquisitions without issuing equity. We acquired three large third-party royalty interests. The first one is over the Great Bear project in Ontario that's owned by Kinross Gold.
We acquired two interest over the Cortez complex, and that's operated by Nevada Gold Mines and Barrick, where we already hold interest as a company. Secondly, we received the return of our initial investment made for gold and copper streams on the Mount Milligan mine in British Columbia. That payback happened in less than 10 years. If you look at the current mine life, that indicates that there's at least another 10 years in front of us to generate a return. Thirdly, given our long track record of paying a growing dividend, we've paid a growing dividend for now 22 consecutive years. Royal Gold became a member of the S&P High Yield Dividend Aristocrats Index at the beginning of last year.
We're the only precious metals company in that index, we're sitting alongside High quality companies like Caterpillar, McDonald's, IBM and so forth. We're very pleased with how that's that worked out for the company given the track record. Let's look a little bit more closely at what we call lower risk exposure to gold and optionality for what Royal Gold provides. We'll do that in the next two or three slides here. I know Amar talked about this a little bit, but I'll just expand a little bit more in terms of how this fits for Royal Gold. This slide summarizes the various types of gold investments available to investors as compared to Royal Gold, all of these offer exposure to the gold price.
Unlike an investment in physical gold, Royal Gold provides both exposure and the potential for properties in our portfolio to produce at one point in the future at no additional cost. Also, unlike an investment in operating companies, Royal Gold does not take on direct exposure to operating and capital costs. That's obviously very relevant in the market we're in today, given the high inflationary situation that we continue to see. We also offer growing and sustainable dividends, and I'm gonna come back to that in more detail later on in the presentation. 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 this is the key reason why our shares command a premium valuation in the marketplace.
I'm gonna give you three examples here in our portfolio. The first two are shown on this slide, and I'll move over to the next one, which is Cortez. On the left-hand side is Pueblo Viejo or PV. This is an operation in the Dominican Republic. The Wassa Mine in Ghana on the right-hand side. These are stream investments we made in 2015. In both cases, adding the potential resource conversions to current reserves are higher than the reserves were at the time of these investments. You just look at the dark blue bars and you can see the difference there of 2002-2022.
It's worth noting that through production, we've recovered more than 75% of our investment at PV, and more than our investment at the Wassa Mine, 124% to be exact. There's growth coming for both of these assets. At PV, the operator, Barrick Gold, is currently looking to expand and maintain the gold production through the mid-2040s. At Wassa, the most recent study outlined new resources that it could extend the mine life by an additional 11 years on top of the current reserve life. Again, Royal Gold doesn't have to pay anything further to receive that kind of upside. Just on Cortez, in our investments, I think this is a really compelling example to show you in terms of optionality to resource growth.
The Rio Tinto royalty that we acquired last year was created in 2008 when Rio Tinto sold their interest in the project to Barrick Gold. At that time, the resource was around 18 million ounces. The royalty was structured in a way that it wouldn't pay until 15 million ounces was produced. At the end of 2021, the resource had grown to almost 27 million ounces, and that production threshold was about to be reached. That's when we were looking at these numbers when we were assessing the opportunity. We went ahead, and we acquired that royalty and another third-party royalty over the project as well. At the end of 2022, the resources grew again to more than 31 million ounces.
We're very pleased to see that outcome in terms of a good example of a fantastic project in the portfolio getting better in time. How has optionality to the gold growth and the investments we've made over time, how has that been reflected in the market in terms of our share price? That's what the chart on the right-hand side is showing here. Our share price has outperformed gold. It's outperformed the GDX index and the general market indices since the GDX was formed back in 2006. We have a beta of 1.9% versus gold, so that's excellent leverage for especially shareholders or investors.
Then we have a low beta versus the broad market for diversification if investors are looking for that kind of investment more on the general side. We can appeal to both types of investors as shown here. I wanna turn to the business development market. As I mentioned, that's where I spend much of my time, and I'll give you a little bit of color about what we're seeing right now in the market and what the industry looks like as a whole, and what we're excited about in general. This slide is the history of the streaming market, going back over the last two decades or so. It's by dollar value of transaction value over that time, as well as use of proceeds on the right-hand side.
I think it's fair to say that streaming has become a common and an accepted form of financing, just given that it's been around for so long. It's a very flexible type of product. It can be used for project development, for balance sheet repair. We saw a lot of that in the 2014-2016 timeframe, as well as M&A. It really depends on what the market needs are at any given time. What that does for us is it gives us a very consistent pipeline of opportunities to review as a result. At the moment, the main use of proceeds are for project development.
That's what we're seeing right now, but we're also seeing M&A type of opportunities where streaming can be used to help a company or an operator acquire an asset or even another company. We've been very active on the business development side over the last 18 months or so. We've deployed $1.2 billion into six material transactions. Five of those are royalties and one stream. They've all been very consistent with our strategy. The combined transactions represent more than 95% in terms of gold weighting, and they're mainly over producing assets in the U.S. and Canada. These assets or transactions also improved our duration and our counterparty quality in the portfolio as well, something that we're looking to improve upon.
Again, we've acquired all of those assets without issuing any equity. We use the revolver that we have in place as well as cash on hand to fund those transactions. I just wanna take a step back here and show you the acquisition history of Royal Gold on this slide. It shows our single asset acquisitions over the last two decades or so. We've deployed about $4 billion into the market. On average, if you spread that out, it's about one transaction a year, but you can see it's very lumpy. That's a function of just where the market is and what the needs are, and we have to be ready to deploy capital and be ready to have the balance sheets to support it, but we can't really dictate when those transactions actually materialize.
I think it's also worth noting, and we talked a little bit about diligence at the top of the slide here, but that's another reason why you don't see more transactions happening. We're very disciplined in our approach. We look at many, many opportunities. On average, we might look at 100 opportunities in a year. We might transact on one or two. It's a very disciplined approach that we take, and that creates some of the lumpiness as well. How do we think about growth and how do we approach growth? I think there's a couple of aspects that we think about. One is discipline, as I just mentioned, but also the goal of achieving accretion for our shareholders.
I wanna give you a couple of examples here to think about with the next couple of slides. This chart is the cumulative view of our results going back to the year 2000, you can see revenue and operating cash flow have far exceeded the increase in our G&A expense and the increase in the gold price. We've largely financed our growth without a significant increase in our share counts. The last equity raise that we did was in 2012. When you see operating cash flow increase 100 times and the shares outstanding grow by just 4 x, that's really delivering accretion to our shareholders over the long term.
Delivering on growth also means maintaining a strong balance sheet and being ready to transact when we need to, and we prioritize our funding by looking at cash on hand. We look at the cash being generated by our portfolio, then we'll look at our revolver. We have a billion-dollar revolving credit facility available. Finally, we'll consider equity if needed. We have almost $550 million of available liquidity currently for growth. That's more than sufficient for what we see in the market right now. The typical size of transaction that we see is $100 million - $300 million, so we can easily afford to do that with the revolver. I think what we can also say in the past, we've always been very focused on paying down that debt.
We'll do the same thing here. We'll pay this off, we hope, in the middle part of next year is the target. I wanna conclude by sharing or giving you some thoughts about why we think Royal Gold is a very unique company. What we often talk about with our company is the relative size. We're the smallest of the big three, so-called big three royalty and streaming companies. What that means is we can transact on, say, a $200 million opportunity, and that's very material for us. I don't think that's necessarily the case for our two larger peers. At the same time, we can compete with them.
We've got the liquidity that we can go up market and look at larger opportunities, but we can also go down market as well and look at the small to midcap peers in terms of what they're looking at, if there's things of interest to us in that size range. We're sitting in a very sweet spot, I think, in the peer group. I think there are four additional reasons that differentiate us, not only from our direct peers, but also from the precious metal producers. I'm just gonna run through these here very quickly, and then we're down to the last couple minutes or so of time. I think the first point is to highlight that we are the only U.S.-domiciled royalty and streaming company.
You add in Newmont and Royal Gold as the other company, Newmont, we're the only larger cap precious metal companies based in the U.S. Royal Gold is included in more than 200 indices in the U.S., so that appeals to a very broad range of investors as a result. Second, we have the lowest share count in the GDX index at 66 million shares, despite existing for more than 40 years as a company. I just point out that if you look at the median share count in the GDX right now, it's about 455 million shares. Quite a large difference there.
Third, although we have not paid a dividend as long as some of our high-quality operating peers, we hold the record for the number of consecutive dividend increases, and I'll show the last slide will show the history of dividend. Finally, Royal Gold is a very high margin business, and for 2022, which is what's shown here, we achieved an almost 80% EBITDA margin. Our cash G&A was just 4% of revenue. I think it's worth noting the scalability of our business. We deployed, as I mentioned, $1.2 billion in the last 18 months, and we didn't add any material resources to our company. We're able to do that growth with the people that we had in place already. It's extremely scalable from that perspective. I mentioned the dividend here.
Here's the history of it, going back to the year 2000. 16% compounded annual growth rates. We're not targeting a specific payout ratio or a yield. We're just looking for sustainability over the long term, and so this is something we're very pleased to show investors. Down to the last 30 seconds. I'll just put this up. I wasn't gonna show this, but what are we excited about in the portfolio? I just point you to the gold bars. Those are some of the properties that we'll start to produce in the coming one to two years, and they're all royalties, but we have growth beyond that as well, in addition to things that are already in the portfolio that we expect to improve over time. Raj, with that, I think I'm out of time unless there are any questions. Thank you.
I think we're out of time for questions, but thank you very much for the presentation.
Okay.