Please disable any adblockers if the video is not showing below.

Alamos Gold

View Company Profile

September 17, 2024 at 11:00 AM (MDT)|Broadmoor Hotel & Resort

John McCluskey

President, CEO & Director

John McCluskey is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Alamos Gold Inc. and has held this position since 2003, when he co-founded the Company with mining hall of famer Chester Millar. Mr. McCluskey is currently a Director of Orford Mining Corporation and a Director at the World Gold Council. Mr. McCluskey is the recipient of the 2023 Viola R. MacMillan Award, given by the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada for showing leadership and a willingness to take risks in the acquisition and development of the Island Gold mine in Northern Ontario. In 2018, he received the Murray Pezim Award for Perseverance and Success in Financing Mineral Exploration by the British Columbia Association for Mineral Exploration, in recognition of his role in the acquisition, financing, and encouragement of successive discoveries at Mulatos, as well as his ongoing success as CEO of Alamos. Mr. McCluskey was also named Ontario’s 2012 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of The Year, based on a judging panel’s assessment of financial performance, vision, leadership, innovation, personal integrity and influence, social responsibility, and entrepreneurial spirit.

This is an automatically generated transcript. Denver Gold Group cannot accept responsibility for mistakes, errors, omissions, or any action taken in reliance thereon. Use of this transcript is governed by Denver Gold Group’s Terms of Use.

Thank you very much for coming everyone. My pleasure to be with you here today to talk about Alamos Gold. We've been doing very well in the market over the last few years. It's driven by a strategy that I think has resonated very well with investors. If you look back to where we were in 2015, before we took advantage of the market bottom to make acquisitions. We were producing from one mine in Mexico called Mulatos. We had produced about 140,000 ounces that year. Our reserves were below 2 million ounces by that point. But we were at the bottom of the market and there were lots of opportunities. We had a very strong cash position, we had over $400 million cash in the treasury and we took advantage of that to make acquisitions. We made back to back acquisitions from 2015 through 2017, we made three acquisitions and really much of our growth and the performance that you see in our stock today is rooted in that chance that we took buying at the bottom of the market.

As you can see today, we're producing at a 600,000 ounce a year rate with the addition of the Magino mine, which we just acquired in July. Looking ahead, with the growth that we have,  internal growth from our operations, we're looking ahead to 900,000 ounces or greater production in the long term, I'm talking out to 2028, 2029.

In addition to that, we have declining costs. We have a lot of low-cost production coming on from Lynn Lake, from the expansion at Island Gold, and from optimization that we'll do at Magino as well. We've moved from being a single asset producer in Mexico to being largely focused on Canada where now we have 90% of our NAV. One of the key aspects of the acquisitions we've made and the efforts we've made in drilling is to really establish long mine lives at all of these operations. There's really good strategic rationale for doing that. For one, it justifies investing the capital required in order to optimize these projects. So across all our mines, we have an 18 year mine life and that's probably as good as it gets in our industry.

 

Just looking at where we've come from a share price perspective. I know this is a question that's coming up in our one-on-one meetings: “You've done very well over the last three years, but what can we expect from you now? can you sustain this kind of performance?” My belief is we can, because as you know, it took us 20 years to go from essentially a standing start to 500,000 ounces of annually production. What we're aiming to do now is effectively double that by the end of the 2020s. We've got the ability to do that just by internally generated growth, fully funded by internally generated cash flow. So, as well as we've done relative to all these other charts you see on there, we're comparing Alamos chart against the GDX, the GDXJ, the gold price itself, the S&P 500. We really had an outstanding run. I think it's sustained by virtue of the fact that we continue to have fantastic success with the drill bit. We've got a very steady program of capital investment over the next few years that's going to drive further production growth and we're going to see our costs coming down. It's worth mentioning that when we made those acquisitions, gold was between $1,100 and $1,300/oz, and I don't think anybody's missed the fact that gold is over $2,500/oz today.

 

This is a slide we put in largely in hope of the more generalist investors taking an interest in our sector. You see a stock chart like Alamos and you think  “well, jeez, I probably missed the run. It's probably all done,” but when you look at our valuation relative to other sectors, it's in fact very attractive. Despite the fact that you can see from our growth between 2014 and today, we've gone from something like US$45 million to US$878 million EBITDA.  That's a pretty impressive run, but I think we're still very much in the front end of a bull market here and we're going to see even further growth ahead. When you look at our valuation, the only sector that's cheaper is the energy sector. So I think there's still a lot of room for value creation and a lot of room for growth.

 

So let's take a look at our track record. I've talked a bit about the M&A work that we've done. We started with the Mulato's project, which was acquired back in 2001, we entered into the agreement anyway, and we concluded it in 2003. Based on the acquisition cost of $10 million we've gone on to generate $614 million accumulated free cash flow. It has a NAV of $694 million now. So against $10 million initial investment, that's quite an impressive return. But generally, if you do that once everybody thinks you're probably not going to ever repeat that, but we've continued to repeat that. If you take a look at our next acquisition, Young Davidson $950 million, that was the first merger of equals ever done in the gold space. Both companies came together at virtually identical market valuations. We've gone on to create tremendous value in terms of NPV growth and free cash flow generation. We've repeated it again with Island Gold, probably in a much more dramatic fashion. I guess it gets a smile from a few people in the audience who recall how poorly that acquisition was received by the market when it was initially announced. Now it's grown into what clearly anybody would define as a Tier 1 asset. The last of these is Lynn Lake acquisition, that was probably the cheapest thing we've done in relative terms. It had 1.6 million ounces defined, we picked it up for about $30 million. With the investment we've made, we're still just above $100 million. It's got a current NAV of $685 million. We expect to make a production decision on that next year and start construction, getting ready to produce in late 2027.

 

Here's the featured item on the menu, Island Gold and Magino. If you wondered how close they are together, you can see the head frame of the shaft that we're sinking into the high grade Island gold mine. In the background, you can see the open pit, Magino, to the right of it, the Magino Mill.  The Magino mill will ultimately handle ore from both mines. It'll take a modest investment to expand the mill capacity in order to accommodate that. Looking ahead to 2026, when the underground mine will be generating about 2,400 tons a day of material through that mill. We see this as the first step which will be completed in 2026, where on a combined basis, we'll be generating about 400,000 ounces of production a year. But look at the size of the reserve, the reserve continues to grow, it's about 11 million ounces now, it's going to continue to grow. Island Gold has been increasing Reserves net of depletion every year that that we've been producing there, that's seven years in a row, and we don't see that slowing down anytime soon. In addition to that, the grade has continued to get better, and I won't be surprised if the grade does increase again in 2024.  Magino has lots of potential, especially expanding to the east where Argonaut was previously limited by the boundary line between the two companies. That boundary line is no longer there. So, we've actually started a $3 million drill program, with the idea of expanding that pit. Looking ahead to a time when we can see probably something more like a 20,000 ton per day operation at Magino as opposed to the current 10,000 tons per day. So there's lots of upside in this story. It's done very well to date, but it's just really exciting looking ahead to see where it can go. I envision a day when we're producing something like 3,000 tons a day from the underground and close to 20,000 tons a day from the open pit, that will see that mine producing at a rate of about 550,000 to 600,000 ounces a year at $1,000 per ounce ASIC. That will make it one of the most profitable gold mines in Canada, and among the most profitable in the world.

 

Mulatos, it's been such a great story. Last year, some of you are aware that it was actually the biggest generator of free cash flow of all our producing mines. This is after 17 years of production, it continues to do well this year. But looking ahead to 2027, we'll come to the end of open pit operations at Mulatos with La Yaqui Grande, which has been such a tremendous producer for us, it's going to come to an end. Effectively, we'll be moving to underground. We've made our first discovery, we started drilling it about three years ago. We have over a million ounces of Reserves delineated there. It continues to grow, and we'll be shifting now from these low grade open pit operations to high grade underground. We'll be building a mine there. We've recently published a study on that. The study shows the 46% IRR , $165 million capex. In fact, Mulatos itself generates enough free cash flow to effectively pay for all that growth. We have a construction team down there, they have built four mines at Mulatos. They're very much ready and enthusiastic about going underground and building their next mine. This will establish production at Mulatos out to 2035. So really exciting days ahead.

 

How does it look all together? Well, that's about as simple a picture as you're going to see the costs are going to decline over time. Over the long term, we'll take production from its current rate, aiming towards that million-ounce threshold by the time we get towards the end of the 2020s. So I think it's a very exciting time for Alamos Gold.

It's that incredible thing that happens with a company. Once you develop enough management depth and critical mass, you've got the cash flow generation, you've got everything you need to effectively start to really accelerate your growth. The normal things that would limit that is, it's typically permits. It’s going to take you forever to get a permit or you need tailings. We don’t have any impediments in that regard. We’ve got all the permits we need at Island Gold to essentially establish that at those rates that I've referred to. We've got the key permits at Lynn Lake and we've got the few ancillary permits one requires to get started which we will pull in next year. Essentially, we're in a really good phase here where nothing really stands in our way. Some of these might sound like very wide eyed projections I'm making, but we've got the proven track record to show that we can do it. I'm very confident that what we're planning on doing over the next 5 to 6 years is all going to come to fruition.

 

So, thank you very much. That concludes the presentation, and we'll have some questions.

Question: Alamos has a lot of organic growth you can see from the presentation. How do you view M&A at this point for the company? Is there an ideal size for Alamos?

Answer: You know, we've been very clear on how we think M&A should be done in a cyclical industry. You should take a cyclical approach, you should take a countercyclical approach to M&A.  When gold was running from $1,500 to $1,900 per ounce around the 2010 to 2012 period, we were just accumulating cash, we didn't do M&A, but when there was a big correction, by the time got into 2015, gold had pulled back from $1,900 to $1,100 per ounce, we became very active and did three back to back acquisitions in the trough. Now, it's moved all the way back, except for this one is very unusual circumstance where the mine next door to us, the company had gone from $4 a share down to $0.30 cents a share. It had gone against the gold price effectively. It presented the opportunity to do an M&A transaction. And you've got to be opportunistic and move on those kinds of opportunities when they present themselves. It was quite an unusual circumstance, I'll acknowledge that, but I think we made the most of it. As far as are we out there beating the bushes for further M&A, to be honest, we're not, we have quite a lot on our plate. You can see through our organic growth alone - we're capable of doubling our production. From my seat, that's about a strong growth profile as I'm aware of in our sector.

 

Question: Touching upon that pause and accumulate cash, how are you thinking about capital returns with the higher gold price right now?

Answer:  We’ve been paying a dividend since 2010. We started paying a dividend very early on in our evolution as a company. I think it shows a certain amount of respect for shareholders to do that. But at the same time, we're getting such a big bang for our buck investing our capital in our growth. We're not trying to compete against dividend paying companies. the big yield plays. That's not our game plan at all. We're a mid-tier gold mining company and we're very aggressive. I think we're getting a great return on capital. If you look back over time, we were generating a 14% annualized return and that's as good as any industry produces. So I think we're going to remain very focused on growth, but we're going to come to a time probably around 2030 where if we have gold prices like we're seeing today and we're producing a million ounces at $1,000 AISC. Are we going to increase that dividend? You bet we will.

 

Question: In terms of exploration success that you've had recently, can you give us a recap on what your exploration team is finding right now?

Answer: This is probably one of the most exciting aspects of the company. we're making new discoveries; we're finding more ore at virtually all of our assets. We've made a new discovery at Young Davidson, something that hasn't really received a lot of attention. We've found high grade in the hanging wall zone and the sediments. It's a direct analogy to Macassa mine where they mined for decades and decades in the syenite unit. And then in the early 2000s, they found a much higher grade in the sediments that gave rise to the South Mine Complex which is now a big driver of profit for them. Now we've done the same. It took some time for us to build out all the lower infrastructure and then to get some underground drifts in place so that we could actually have some access to drilling onto those targets. We've exhausted those now and we won't have more places to drill until next year, until we do some exploration drifts to provide more access to that target. But we've demonstrated that the mineralization is there. We already had a very good indicator that it was, because in the early days, the old Matachewan consolidated mine, they were mining high grade like 4 gram material in the sediments in an open pit. So we knew it was there at the top, but with a big. Huronian cover, essentially obscuring the target. It was too expensive and impractical to try to drill it from surface. But with all the development that we've done underground, it finally gave us an opportunity to take a look. We were very gratified to find that it looks to be well mineralized. In addition to the fact that we have access to drill it, there are also something like 50 or so drill holes that went down through these sediments into the syenite in the days when they were defining the Young-Davidson ore body and they never sampled any of the intercepts that went through the sediments themselves. They only sampled where they got into the syenite. So we have all that core on site and we have a program in place right now. There's ~ 40,000 m of core in place where we're going to essentially sample it and see if we can add to the story without actually having to drill.

Elsewhere, we're finding higher grade as we go deep at Island Gold.

We're finding higher grades at Mulato as we go after the sulphide . We're putting a number of drill holes into the old Cerro Pelon deposit where we mind out something like 300,000 ounces of oxides. But we have a hole there that drills that was drilled into 55m of 15 grams. So there's no doubt that underneath these oxide deposits that we've been mining, we're going to find sulphide mineralization. I think that's going to carry Mulatos well into the future.

 

Question: Could you please touch on the biggest longer term opportunity you have in your portfolio? That's already embedded in your portfolio.

Answer: if you look at the fact that we have unfolding discoveries right now at Lynn Lake, at Island Gold, at Mulatos and at Young Davidson,  I've never seen another time in my career where I see ore bodies expanding everywhere we turn. Exploration is continually demanding more and more dollars, and of course, we're very happy to give it to them. Our finding cost per ounce at Island Gold has been $13/oz. So, you know, we had a $2,500 ounce of gold for $13, you know, that's a great plan to back. Similarly at Mulatos, I think finding costs have been around $23 per ounce. So exceptionally low for the results that we're getting. I think that by the time a company becomes a mid-tier producer and the analysts are all typically focused on costs and on production growth and so forth. They ignore the value that companies in the mid-tier range can create with the drill bit and we've been so successful at that and I think we're going to continue to do so. You can hardly fail to mention it when you get asked a question like that.


NOTICE

The Denver Gold Group does not make any express or implied condition, representation, warranty or other term as to the accuracy, validity, reliability, timeliness or completeness of any information or materials in general or in connection with any particular use or purpose presented at the Gold Forum. Denver Gold Group cannot accept responsibility for sourcing variances, mistakes, errors or omissions or for any action taken in reliance thereon. Use of this data is governed by Denver Gold Group's Terms of Use.

The Denver Gold Group does not represent or endorse the accuracy or reliability of any third party advice, opinion, statement, information or materials received during the Gold Forum.

INVESTMENT ADVICE - NO OFFER OR RECOMMENDATION

The Gold Forum and the information and materials presented at the Gold Forum do not, and shall not be construed as, making any recommendation or providing any investment or other advice with respect to the purchase, sale or other disposition of any regulated gold related products or any other regulated products, securities or investments, including, without limitation, any advice to the effect that any gold related transaction is appropriate or suitable for any investment objective or financial situation of a prospective investor. A decision to invest in any regulated gold related products or any other regulated products, securities or investments should not be made in reliance on any of the information or materials presented or obtained during the Gold Forum. Before making any investment decision, prospective investors should seek advice from their financial, legal, tax and accounting advisers, take into account their individual financial needs and circumstances and carefully consider the risks associated with such investment decision.