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To, I hope we're going to leave you with a clear understanding of the opportunities in the junior royalty space as well as some of the challenges that they face. And I think we're also going to leave you with some very good, maybe 12345, good stock ideas at the end of the day. So we're going to start the session off with each. We've got a lot of time. We'll have time for questions, but we're going to start the session off with each company just giving us a very broad overview of what their company is maybe for, shall we say four minutes each? And we've got a predetermined order. So Brett Heath, where are you there? You are, you go first. Ok, good afternoon, everybody. My name is Brett Heath. I'm the pres CEO of Mittal royalty. We trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol MT A and also in Canada under the symbol MT A on the TSX Venture Exchange. We focus on gold, silver and copper primarily right now. Our waiting is about two thirds gold to a to a third copper exposure. we've got over 100 royalties in our portfolio today. Most of those are kind of weighted towards development, which is giving us a very significant growth profile between now and the end of the decade. And currently we are in North America in South America in Australia from a jurisdictional perspective and within those jurisdictions, highly concentrated around the most proven geological trends within, within those jurisdictions. Is that it good? Next up is Dave Cole Ceo and founder of Emx. Thanks Adrian. Yeah, you know, when I left Newmont Mining Corporation 21 years ago to found this company, I fundamentally, it was of the belief that the value of mineral rights are going to go up over time. You wanted to be exposed to the as many mineral rights as you can. And the best way to do that is through the ownership of royalties because royalties rock and they're phenomenal financial instruments with immense embedded optionality. And the so it went out on this mission to, to acquire and build a royalty portfolio via two mechanisms, one through royalty generation, where we are actually the underlying mineral rights holder. And we add value through collection of geological data and illustrate illustrating the prospective of that asset, sell it on in exchange for royalties and other payments. And then a quite synergistic aspect to that is also royalty purchasing. And I believe that the the real value that we've created over the last 20 years has been in the integration of those two where the same teams that are outdoing that royalty generation are also identifying royalties to be purchased and some of those have been of, of exceptional value creation. A third thing that we do is occasionally we make strategic investments. And over our 21 year history, we've netted 55 million US d in profits from our strategic investments, which we have funneled right back into royalty generation and royalty purchase. And that's it in a nutshell. I will point out as Brett did at ticker symbol, emx on the New York Stock Exchange and ticker symbol, emx on the Toronto Venture Exchange. Thank you. OK, thank you. Next up is David Gallo, CEO of Gold Royalty Corp. Good afternoon. As Adrian said, David Groff, I'm the founder and CEO of Gold Royalty Corp. We took the company public about three years ago with 18 royalties on a series of development stage assets throughout the Americas. And over the course of the last several years through a combination of M and a third party royalty acquisition project financing and also royalty generation our own right in Nevada and Quebec, we've grown to over 240 royalties predominantly across the Americas, Quebec and Nevada and Ontario where we have a heavy concentration, seven cash flowing royalties currently 14 in various stages of development. That's underpinning revenue growth of about 100 and 60% this year and this is a pivot year for us an inflection point if you will, we're actually generating positive free cash flow. And, and I think that's remarkable for a start up company that really was a concept a little over 3.5 years ago and now has grown into sustainable and growing business with revenue growth, compounding at about 60% per annum on average right through the end of the decade and from some of the largest producing gold mines in North America, we have royalties on three of the five biggest producing gold mines in Quebec, Nevada and Ontario in Cote Canadian Malartic and the Underground Station of Gold strike. So we are in a position to be generating stronger and stronger free cash going forward over the course of the next several years, an exigent decade with about 50 to 60,000 ounces of gold equivalent production from a variety and well diversified portfolio of precious metal royalties across the Americas. OK. Thank you, David. And next up is Frederick Bell, founder, Ceo of Elemental Tis royalties. Thank you Adrian and thank you everyone for being here. Elemental Altus is about 160 million US market cap company currently listed on the TSX V under Cymbal Ele and on the OTC EF look, I think one of the key core tenants of the company is we've always been cash flow positive from day one since we started the company privately. Seven years ago, we listed in 2020 every year has been a record year of revenue expecting this year to be another and going into next year to be the same. And what that has allowed us to do is it's allowed us to keep a meaningful management ownership percentage in the company while also starting to lower our cost of capital. We currently have about 11 producing assets and a portfolio of about 70 in total. So we are really well diversified by operator by jurisdiction, probably two thirds gold in terms of commodity mix and the third copper. And I think as we have grown the company and we have become more free cash flow positive and lower cost of capital that has then enabled us to go out and start to build out the development portfolio at the same time as continuing to grow our revenue base. And that is a quick snapshot of the company. Thank you. And last but by no means least Alexandra W Sharon, the founder ceo of empress royalties. Thank you Adrian and thank you everyone for being here. Empress royalty. We are a precious metals royalty and streaming creation company. We've started the company about 3.5 years ago. Our focus is to invest into companies that are either in production or near term production, really leveraging off our experience in structured finance. My background, investment banking and financial teamed up with the team there. We were seeing the streaming companies providing that financing solution. We're getting bigger, bigger investment side. So we set up M RS to fund smaller companies subset of $25 million. We started off with some development assets. We've layered in some producing assets. We now have four sources of revenue coming into empress and proving that strategy out. We're also on the TSXB and the symbol em pr and on the OTCQX and the symbol E MP YF. OK. Thank you very much. Well, during this panel, we're going to look at the royalty space, particularly the junior royalty space and then later on in the session, we'll dig into the individual companies. But let's just start with a fairly broad question, you know, in the royalty space, you've got companies like Franco and Wheaton, each of which has over billion dollars, cash and a billion dollars on their lines of credit. How do you smaller companies compete? Are you simply fishing in different ponds or do you come up against the larger companies when you're competing for transactions? And if you do come up against the larger companies, how do you guys have an edge to win the royalties? Who wants to take that? I'm happy to leave that. Look, I think in terms of the deal flow size, it's changed a lot since we started the company first deal was a million dollars transaction and over time we've grown that every year and we've been able to do deals up to the 55 million mark. And so sometimes on those larger transactions, we are coming up against the larger companies and more often than not lower cost of capital, we aren't winning those processes. So I think what we have done is we have really tried to focus on opportunities that are more off the beaten path. We have also sometimes done transactions directly with royalty owners where they have also become shareholders in the company and taken part equity as a way of continuing to gain exposure to their own royalty, but also through a diversified portfolio. So I think we've tried to do a combination of finding royalties ourselves and generating our own deal flow of making some counter parties, co owners in the companies in the company as we have grown. And then there is also an element of some of the transactions we have looked at have been more material for us than they would have been for the larger. So a combination of all those David, that question was actually suggested to me by Jackie, your, your, your own vice president. So I think you should answer it fair enough To answer your question. Do we come up against the Francos and the Wheaton of the world? We certainly do. And almost every time we fail to prevail, just because they do as Fred suggested have a much lower cost of capital than we do. It's instructive for us to go through those processes to understand the quality of the asset base of, of available opportunities out there. Due diligence is, is an important exercise for us to really get a sense of our asset quality against what's available out there. But by and large, every acquisition we've made successfully has been through an exclusive process where we've leveraged a relationship that somebody in our board of management has or within our shareholder base for that matter. Collectively, we have over 400 years of industry experience. Many of us have come from an operating and mind development background and that affords us a couple of unique advantages. One is we have a clear eyed view of the underlying risk of what we're investing in so we can price it appropriately because we've been operators. We've been builders, we understand the risk intimately. But also, we bring all of us a very deep rolodex to the table and time and again, somebody in our board management and our strategic shareholder base has brought an opportunity to us that we're able to transact on exclusively. And that's very important because if we do go up against the large players will, will ultimately fail because they are willing to pay more because they have a lower cost of capital. Well, let's dig into that a little more if we can I mean, you've talked about relationships but we assume that Franco and Wheaton and Cisco also have relationships. How do, how do you get these relationships? But how without giving away your trade secrets, how do you persuade the owner of a royalty to give you an exclusive? Yeah. Look, I, I think it really, it's circumstantial,, each situation is unique in terms of,, the ability to keep it exclusive., it does come down to trust at the end of the day. This is a, a business of people and, and by and large when we've done deals on an exclusive basis is with counter parties that we've had a relationship with. In the past, we've transacted with in the past. And there's a level of trust that we can act efficiently on the due diligence, we can transact efficiently and we bring a tremendous amount of expertise and M and A within our group. Our Chief development officer John Griffith, you know, ran the mining group at Merrill Lynch Andrew Gubbels, our CFO ran the mining group at U BS for many years. So we do bring a, a good skill set within our board of management. It demonstrates that we can act efficiently both in the diligence and execution phase. And I think that's important. Time is important as well as headline numbers. Alexander. I think you want to say something. Yeah. So with, with Mrs, we haven't been in a competitive bid process to date all the deals we're sourcing and looking at are coming through our network. Again, as I mentioned, Deborah Financial been around for 30 years, a key shareholder in Mr our board. So we're, we really are funding a lot of opportunity. And again, it's through our network and saying, you know, having that expertise, understanding who the people are and it really does come down to people who we're investing in and because we're not buying royalties, we are working directly with the companies and investing our investment dollars there, those relationships are key. Did you want to say some bread? Yeah, I can comment on this. I mean, the the short answer to your question is you, you don't compete with them. That's, that's the short answer. You look at as growing a junior royalty company, you're at a pretty incredible disadvantage compared to the big guys generally. So the key is always trying to figure out where do you have that competitive advantage? And there, there's a bunch of different ways you can grow a business. But you know, I think the key is always figuring out where that advantage is and being the best at it because there are a lot of different ways to grow your business. And under understanding really where you need to get to until you get to a point where you have the profile of the assets, you have the cash flow profile to where you can have a competitive cost of capital and can compete on that level. But I think trying to compete on that level when you're not ready, can be a big problem. for Mattala, when we started, we, we understood we needed to have a scalable business. And in order to have a scalable business in the royalty and streaming sector, you needed to have really great operators. And as a small company, obviously, big operators are not taking capital from large royalty companies much less small ones. And so, you know, we took that approach, you know, buying existing royalties to lever into not only exposure to what we view as the best geology with the most optionality, but also the best jurisdictions and the best operators. Because once we bought that royalty on an Igne O Eagle property or a Newmont property or a Barrack property, you know, we could move on to the next one and we had that time where, you know, if you're sitting there and competing in a competitive process, you're not only wasting potentially time because the the probability of success is so low when you, when you're all competing at the same level, but you're also wasting money because there's big cost to that. So I think there's a number of different ways to go about it. You can approach it from an M and a perspective, you can approach it through an asset allocation perspective. Like that's what we did, you know, 11 part of the market that we feel that, you know, the sector has a difficult time pricing is really understanding the optionality value of these assets and inevitably royalties. Like when you look back, historically, the biggest returns were we're capturing that optionality and there's no way to fit optionality necessarily into a spreadsheet. So it becomes a little bit more of an art than a science, but it can be done. We've seen our large here is be very successful with that. And I think that, you know, it's, it's again, it's, it's understanding where you are understanding your competitive advantage and that may change. But really, it's, it's, I think for all of us, it's about getting to that level, which you can call it like an intermediate profile from a cash flow and an asset perspective, which then gives you that access to access to capital, which then gives you the liquidity and gives you all of the other things that you need to be able to go out and kind of compete and scale the business from there going forward. I'm going to continue the theme a little bit, but just add a new dimension, particularly for the two on my left, David and Fred start with you, David. Obviously a lot of your business is royalty generation and Fred, you also have some royalty generation, but of course, you've scaled it down. So I'd like you both to, is it just, you know, different strokes for different folks or talk about the advantages of prospect royalty generation as well as perhaps the disadvantages of royalty generation. Ha happy to talk about that. The disadvantages is that the assets you develop are early stage. Therefore, there's a long time lag towards production and that's why it's important to also buy royalties. But one great advantage of our royalty generation work is that does not compete with the big guys that you were mentioning. And specifically Franco Nevada believes it's a very good business to execute on. And that has attracted Franco to become a shareholder in EMX and has made them a preferred capital partner of ours. And one way to compete with with the big guys is to syndicate with them and to form joint ventures with them. We currently have a joint venture with Franco to seek early stage royalty financings and we have syndicated the purchase of Castro is our largest cash flow royalty with them. And also another tranche of that with Fred at Elemental and that's a way to punch above your weight class is through syndication. Adrian, yeah, another way is is as Brett was pointing out sleuthing and finding opportunities. And I mentioned the synergies of those folks that are doing the royalty generation work, finding opportunities to buy royalties that are not going through a competitive process and look from, from our perspective we, we had a, a royalty generation unit predominantly Africa focused. So the, so the large part of the portfolio was in, in Egypt, in, in Mali and in Morocco. And to illustrate a few of the examples of what we did there, but we effectively outsourced those projects and those assets to counter parties who could advance them faster than we could or who had better balance sheets to advance them than we could or who in the case of the project in Mali, since we sold that in Q three Q four last year, that asset is now going into production as a satellite from existing mines. So it's gone from a wholly owned project to a cash flowing royalty within 12 months. And if you look at the the other countries, the other projects in Morocco, we spun them into a London listed explorer which we own approximately 20 per cent of. We have a royalty on all the projects including one where they have AJ V with Rio in Egypt. We did a deal with a private company owned by one of Egypt's richest families and they are funding the exploration privately there. And I think we are the second or third largest landholder in Egypt after sentiment seemed to be Anglo O Shanty and they are actively drilling there and we retain equity in that company too privately. We also have a royalty on all the projects. So what we've managed to do I think is we've leveraged our holdings and our different projects to four or five counter parties who are spending combined probably 10 to 20 times over the last year, what we would have been able to do. And in the case of the diva project actually take that all the way through into production and cash flow. And the question for the other three, is there any particular reason that you don't do royalty generation? Actually? Actually, that's a quarter of our business. We have a small group in Reno, Nevada, Bel or Quebec that actually do that. Over 60 of our 240 royalties are gene it organically through their prospecting efforts. What we don't take is any exploration risk. So we farm the properties out before any significant expiration. Investments are required, take royalties back and return. Quite often we get option payments last year alone. We generated over $3 million of option revenue from our royalty generation business, which covered almost half of our GN A costs corporately. And yeah, at RIS we know we all have a structured finance background. So we're very much focused on revenue producing assets and that's we sort of launched it with that concept so that we can reinvest back into the portfolio, the revenue we're generating with less tradition to shareholders. So we're, we're much more on the other side of it than the exploration side. And now, sorry. Yeah, I was just gonna say for us, it's it, you know, that that's not something that we specialize in and we want, we want to engage in activities that we feel that we have the biggest competitive edge. from a time perspective, the, you know, we, we like to buy stuff not in production because we can get really good attractive valuations on it and we can get into different assets and get exposure to different assets that we have a very high level of confidence that there's a lot of growth there, particularly, the operators might not fully understand the extent of what's there, you know. Perfect example is when we bought the the, the Kay Goslin royalty, this was a, you know, preso royalty, we picked up a 1.35% that covers all of Goslin in a small part of Kay. And within a few years now there's, you know, 7.4 million ounces, but that's the time frame that we wanna try to understand where you know, we, we, we know that there's something there, we know that there's a significant mineral deposit there. We don't know the full extent, we know that the operator is going to be advancing it and spending a lot of money and that kind of hopefully shrinks the kind of time frame that, that you've got to wait from you know, understanding kind of what that is to what it'll be compared to, you know, engaging in kind of pure exploration looking for the asset. And obviously, if you find something where nothing was there, I think you can see not only within the royalty sector but the mining sector itself, like there's huge you know, wealth that's created through those types of activities. But the probability is so small, it's really difficult for us to kind of engage in that, in that business and really kind of understand the returns and, and make that make sense from, you know, just from a general holding cost and so forth. Now, of course, another way that juniors can compete for larger assets is through syndication. You mentioned that very briefly, David. So tell me about syndication. Have you participated in syndicated deals? Do you like the idea? Are there risks are problems? How has it worked? Who Wants to go first? Yeah, we, we haven't participated in a syndication yet. Some of the deals that we're looking in our pipeline, that might be the option. There's also quite a few private funds out there that are in this dreaming model, which would be good partners for us. But the idea for us is to get the money to the projects that need it. So, syndication makes sense. We'll do that. We've set up a structure, in fact, a strategic arrangement with tourists who are represented here today. Jamie and Drew, welcome. And under that arrangement, we've endeavored to look at Precious Metal royalty opportunities together,, on a joint venture basis,, with,, a threshold of over $30 million. So that allows us to leverage their deep pool of capital. They have a dedicated royalty fund of over $200 million that they're actually looking to grow., but also allows us to expand our geographic footprint because they have boots on the ground in areas that we don't have any core competencies. So we're able to share intelligence across geographies, but also be able to leverage the capital they have available to deploy to new royalty opportunities of scale. Anyone knows. Well, obviously we're big fans. personally, I think it's a great way to diversify risk and share due diligence costs and, and I'm always welcome to syndicate royalties with you guys or, or the big guys as we have done and look from our perspective, we syndicated probably syndicated for a few different reasons. So far. I think the first deal we actually did as a company, we syndicated with one of the mining private equity funds, partly to get the deal done, but also because they were a 20 per cent shareholder in the miner. So it gave us an access, a level of access to DD and confidence in the project that we might not otherwise have had. The second example of syndication we did was with another private group and that was where it was probably due to the size of the portfolio and splitting the cost and enabling us to do something that was a better fit for us in terms of size. And then more recently, we've syndicated on the same role with Amex and with Dave and I think that has been a really good opportunity for us so far. So we'll continue to do it where it makes sense. We've looked at a few more that haven't come to pass. Sometimes that's been for trying to balance the jurisdiction risk. Sometimes it's for the stage of the project, but we continue to look at those when the opportunity is right. I mean, we're obviously a small industry. Everybody knows each other with syndication. Is there a risk? But if you find a good deal and you sort of mention it to someone else, they'll just say, well, we could buy the whole lot ourselves or do you always tie it up with a contract before you even mention it to someone else? Yes, I think for everyone's benefit, it makes sense to start with the, because you could both be looking at it separately, you could have done it before. So I think everyone's interests when we're all looking at transactions and, and I think often we're seeing them on a daily basis, almost trying to juggle them. So I think with some groups, we have long standing cas in place so we can look at opportunities when convenient together and others we do on an ad hoc basis where there's a specific fit, but I think that is normally best for both parties. Ok. So here's a question for everybody on the panel and it's a very broad one when you're first looking at a new potential royalty acquisition., what are the most important things you look at? what are the things that will kill the deal for you early on? Do you prefer to use paper? Do you prefer to use cash? And how do you price? And then I guess a totally separate question really is, how do you price the royalties? What are you looking at in pricing? What's the most important factors? Well, I think it all starts with the geological model frankly and, and I would say that our organization is probably geologically intensive in terms of their technical expertise. We have a couple of very, very strong geologists, operational geologists on, on our staff that conduct that initial due diligence and it lives and dies on the geological model. You know, we screen a lot of opportunities very early based on the geology. And in fact, we've looked at over 300 opportunities since we founded the company three years ago. We've only executed in 11. I would say the vast majority that get screened early, get screened early on geological criteria. And then trying to get comfortable with the jurisdiction, the operational expertise, it's kind of second in, in terms of list of criteria. Do, do the operators have expertise in that geography? Do they have expertise in developing? Do they have the capital wherewithal to advance and optimize their projects or, or keter or criteria? We're quite flexible in consideration and we've used various forms of consideration to do deals whether it's paper or cash combination. There. It really depends on what the vendor is looking for. Quite often. They're looking to participate in the rerate and they're quite happy to take at least an element of paperback. And that's been the case in a number of our key acquisitions. So they could participate in the optionality that we hope to crystallize in the ASIS we're acquiring. So it really depends on, on the situation. Ok? I I I'll add to that, I believe that we can all do the financial engineering to understand what a cash flow from a from a reserve is and you pick your commodity price, pick your discount rate. You can do the math. Come up with a, we've all come up with a similar number but where the rubber meets the road is understanding as David Garfio said that geological potential with respect to the discovery optionality and that's, that's where the value of oil can be exceeded by 10 or 100 times in some cases. And oh, thanks, you speak up. Plus we have the rain on the roof right now here. So did that come through Adrian now? Ok. Do you want me to repeat that? Got it. Did everybody hear what they've said? Some did some didn't? Yeah, we're having a great deal of difficulty hearing, hearing each other. Thank you for pointing at you. And you're nodding. So we're assuming you can hear. I, I just very briefly reiterate the rubber meets the road and understanding the geological potential and it started raining again. That's a, that's kind of interesting actually. Yeah. Who you know, from our perspective, we very much look at it from the economic point of view. We're directly dealing with the companies. We want to understand what their goals are at the initial phase, whether we can meet that. And then we do a desktop review using our our technical advisor and Financial for that David Lang who's here today. If that makes sense and we can get agreed economic terms. And the, the DD is stacking up from the initial point of view, we'll then hire third party experts to come in and look at it from the technical aspects, the legal aspects, the financial aspects before it moves to documentation. So, you know, we've rejected now six deals of the last 18 months that didn't technically stack up for us and we couldn't see the real potential of where we could go, but it's very hands on and there's a lot of due diligence. We all do that goes into this. A lot of hard work. Yeah, I would, I would you know, concur with a lot of the comments that I heard appear so far on that. I mean, the, the, the geology is very important but the operator is also very important because if you've got amazing geology that's stuck in a junior with no capital to do anything with it, it might be a decade before it sees any type of progress. And you got to pay attention to that from, you know, capital allocation perspective. If you lose a decade, you basically lose your investment. you know, particularly with the discount rates that people are using today on, on certain types of assets. So operator, well financed operator, very experienced operator, and more importantly, you want to understand that the asset is a priority for them. Are they going to talk about it? If it's a big company and they don't disclose anything in their quarter about the asset, then it's difficult for the royalty company to communicate any progress about the asset to its shareholders. So the operator is very important jurisdiction is also very important because especially like as we move, you know, further into more kind of geopolitics around the world, like we're seeing more and more risk, I think from other jurisdictions in regards to where that is. And you know, you could understand and have the best technical view of an asset. But if the country decides they want to take it away, guess what? It's, it's a zero. And, you know, unfortunately that happens in this industry because you can't pick up a mine and move it to a different country if the government's not cooperating. So, you know, I'd say they're all really important,, factors., from what was the second question? You had a few questions? Well, I was asking when you start to look at something, what are the sort of factors that might come up that would make you say no, very quickly, you obviously know the jurisdiction to begin with. But what would you discover that makes you say, oh no, this isn't for us. So look, the, the, the first thing that we do is is kind of take a step back and like, really understand where the risk lies in this business. And you know, you want, you want to apply all the, the, the the technicals to the decision, but you also don't want to forget about common sense. And when you look back, historically, you've got 90% of the losses in the royalty and streaming sector by doing making investments on single asset developers. So eliminating in our view, single asset developers basically eliminates right off the bat almost 90% of the risk that has caused losses within the royalty and streaming sector. And the reason is, is because there's a lot of risk building a mine and if you're a single asset developer and usually they're not the best and most well financed companies. And if they do little things to cut corners and if there's one little problem,, well, guess what happens, the market can sniff that out a mile away, their equity valuation goes down and as a holder, like you can become the lender of last resort or you just lose the royalty. And so, you know, we've seen that time and time and time again within this industry. So that's something like, you know, when we are looking at investments. Ok. Well, if this is, if this is a, you know, single asset developer that's got a very high cost of capital that has never built a mine before, then even if the returns are really great from a, from an investment perspective, or even if the geology looks really good, but we're probably not going to do that deal. One thing to keep in mind is that risks are multiplicative. So there's a little bit of environmental risk, a little bit of metallurgical risk, a little bit of engineering risk, the deposit maybe wasn't modeled as well as it should have been. Next thing, you know, it fails. And that's why you hire sharp engineers, Adrian. And I guess one thing you all look at obviously, but I think it's also important for investors to look at when they hear a company say, oh, we've got a royalty and we've got a royalty on, we've got a royalty on you name it is to find out. Does that royalty cover the entire, the entire area? Does it just cover part of the part of the deposit? And how much ground feels do you have as well? Because that's obviously that's obviously where you get the optionality. If your royalty covers a lot of ground around the mine site around a known deposit, then you can participate in the optionality. Does anyone want to talk about that? Because I know, for example, I love to, I'd love to so well. I co own a royalty with, with Fred here. Elemental at Cassarone is operated by by Lundeen Money Corporation in Northern Chile and the our royalty footprint on that royalty is absolutely immense. And Lundeen's doing a plethora of exploration work and talking about a new discovery at the Un Helia project fully within our footprint. That's why you want to own royalties. That's why you want to own royalties right there. So, footprint and the geology of the footprint, very important, maybe illustrated as an example. One of our royalties in Australia, Kwinda, one of our larger producing royalties along with CAS, that's an asset that has since it was started, since we bought the royalty effectively, every year that reserve has increased. And at the same time, they've been mining it. So we sit here today three years on four years on from the mine build and they've paid us probably order of magnitude $20 million in that time for holding the royalty. The reserve is larger today than it was at the time they bought it. They're continuing to vest in exploration and we've had the benefit of the gold price going up. And that operator just recently last month announced a potential throughput expansion of up to 50 per cent. So increasing the throughput of 50 per cent of the mining when Dave talked a second ago about the risks multiplying, you can also get that on the optionality on the upside. So really locking in as much exploration ground, which often attributes you attribute very little value to the time it's almost intangible. But down the line, that can actually be a whole new discovery, a whole new royalty. So always trying to lock in uncapped royalties covering as much ground as possible. I think you're hitting on one of the fundamental advantages of our business is is yes the royalty coverage. But the flip side of that coin is how much work is being done on the covered area. And within our portfolio. On average, over the last three years, our operating partners have invested over $200 million per annum, or the equivalent of over half a million meters per annum of exploration drilling and that's free optionality. All of our royalties are bought and paid for as, as the case for many of our peers here and we get the benefit of that expiration upset with a actually having to pay for it. Ok. We are going to take questions from people in the audience a little later, but I just want to make sure, do we have a microphone to go around? We do. Ok. Not yet. Not yet. Think of your questions. Think of your questions, please. I've got a couple more questions on the sector and then we've got some questions to drill down on the specific, to drill down on the companies. So this one won't apply to the young people on the panel like Alexandra. But you know, I can remember, I mean, I can remember when Seymour Sulick, who of course came from the oil and gas business had the brilliant idea simply over brilliant and I've always thought that the most brilliant ideas usually are the simplest. Well, why don't we do royalties in the gold business? Why don't we create a gold royalty business? And of course, Pierre Pierre Lean and Seymour border royalty on gold strike. That was what the early eighties I think Doug. So we've obviously seen huge changes in royalty business since then because in the early stages, it was all purchasing of legacy royalties. Now we create royalties. Now we have streams and now we have all sorts of bells and whistles. How have you seen the business evolve for the juniors say over the last five or 10 years, those of you were doing this 10 years ago and how do you see it evolving in the future, Dave? Not because you're the oldest, but just am I the oldest I might be. I still feel young Adrian, the the, the business has evolved greatly, it will continue to evolve. And Franco Nevada has become a, a bank essentially providing, you know, credit for major expansions as have the other majors and, and that's actually put them into a different playing field that's opened up opportunities for us to, to find opportunities at the base of the pyramid. I believe as, as you know, folks have already mentioned, I I believe it will continue to evolve in that manner. It's no secret that royalties are phenomenal financial instruments. So when they trade in the secondary markets, they're going to trade at a premium. And we all use our various techniques to be able to sleuth and find those and figure out how to pay for those. Many of the companies on this panel are now positive cash flow and have their own ability to, to write checks. In fact, I brought my checkbook in my pocket here just in case. because you told me I should, I did just a different perspective. I came from an operating background and when I was running hud Bay about a dozen years ago, and we were building the consum mine in Peru. We entered into a streaming arrangement on the small component of precious metals we had in consum with, with Randy Smallwood at Wheaton and that raised $750 million. And the name of the game back then was arbitrage. The base metal companies were training at half of NAV, Randy was training at two times and he paid me one time for, for that stream. So everybody won. And really, that was kind of the prescriptive way to do streams and royalties and that you did them with base metal companies that had by-product precious metals. It was almost unheard of for primary precious metal producers to do streams and royalties on their assets. But that's evolved because it's been a nuclear winter for the juniors for a good dozen years. They haven't had access or for the emerging developers and operators. They haven't had access to capital markets like they used to on the precious metal side. So they've had to entertain including streams and royalties in their capital structure even even if it's a primary precious metal producer. So the cost of capital has gone up dramatically for the developers and explorers in the primary or the precious metal industry. And so it's evolved from that just being a byproduct's actually selling precious metals and streams on primary precious metal producers. Yeah, I think it was much more an alternative source of financing before and now it's much more mainstream as I mentioned, we talked before, it was much more bigger companies had access to this and now that's coming so downmarket and to the smaller companies allowing us to help them with their financing. So I think it's evolving a lot more in that project financing type of way. Right. And David, sorry, I was just going to say that maybe one innovation as well that's changed recently is commodity specific royalty vehicles. And so you've seen that in the Uranium space, you've seen it in the lithium space, but effectively giving investors who want access to that commodity, a specific targeted vehicle that will be pure play and focus. But taking all the advantages of the royalty model and you've seen a few of those recently over the last couple of years in the space and it's an interesting trend effectively giving investors another way to participate. Well, since you brought that up, how do you all see, how do you view other commodities? I mean, some people tell me they're completely commodity agnostic as long as it, as long as it generates cash and other people want to stick with gold and silver. How, how do you each do that? II, I think when you're small, there's less luxury for diversification than there would be for a major certainly within Franco's portfolio. For example, there's significant diversification out of precious metals, but the the market is willing to accept that and afford them the kind of premium multiple you typically see in precious metal royalty and streaming companies. There is, there is scope for some, we've introduced some copper, for example, recently when we bought a royalty on the Cozine mine in Mexico and more recently on the virus mine in, in Bosnia. but I think predominantly they like us to focus on precious metals. Now. That being said, I've spent a big part of my career building polymetallic deposits with significant precious metal in them, including Laurent when I was at Nico and Lawlor, when I was at Hutt Bay. And I would love to have polymetallic deposits in our portfolio that generally have longer lives and tend to have natural low cost structures because of their by product credit. So having at least a precious metal component I think is important. But polymetallic deposits, particularly LME metals would fit very nicely within our portfolio. David, you mentioned a little earlier the cost of capital for developers. But how about the cost of capital for junior royalty companies? I'm asking the question, I know the answer but for people who don't, are you able to get bank debt or do banks just say you're too small? Where do you get your lines of credit and access to cash? Do you want us to go right down the line? Yes. Franco Nevada is our lender. We're delighted to have them as a capital partner and we have cash flow coming in so that we can afford to make incremental purchases with our cash flow organically. Right now, we feel that our shares are trading at a discount to NAV therefore, we're not in the mood to use that as a capital source that would be too expensive from when we started as a private company. We've evolved our lending structure and I think we've continually brought down the cost of capital. But to give an example, when we started privately, it was one of our shareholders who lent us $4 million at the time to complete an acquisition and enable us to do the financing. Subsequently, we were then listed. And when we listed, I think we were the first royalty company to borrow money with spot lending. And that was a facility that enabled us to close a transaction before we went public and then use the proceeds of the listing to repay that credit facility. And then subsequently, as we grew the portfolio and we diversified our revenue base. We were able to upgrade that a facility to the big banks. So C I BC and National Bank lenders to a lot of the major royalty companies. And again, that brought our cost of capital down further. So we've continually evolved that and with it, we've increased the flexibility we have. And I think as Dave said, we're very conscious that there is a healthy balance of debt to carry. So this year, we've paid down $5 million a quarter. So far, taking our debt from 30 million to 20 million. If we continue by Q two next year, we will have cleared the balance. And at the same time, we've been able to continue to make acquisitions this year from cash flow. So I think it's a very healthy position to be in. But the focus really was lowering our cost of capital early on and giving ourselves the flexibility to have a facility in place when we want to use it. At Empress, we started the portfolio with some development assets. When we acquired the producing asset, we took a debt facility on with Nabari. We had that for two years. We've just refinanced that in December. So we have a $28.5 million accordion facility. We've drawn down 8.5 and we have $20 million available to us. But the focus is to bring the cost of capital down like we did with this and now that we've got four sources of revenue and we will bring more into the portfolio as well. We'll continue to focus on that. Look, I think everybody on the stage has to be necessarily creative in their capital structure. In our situation, we have both a traditional bank facility or revolving credit facility with Bank of Montreal, a National Bank, a three year facility that we've been kind of extending on an evergreen basis. that's helped to fund things quickly when we needed access to capital to acquire an opportunity on an expedited basis. And then most recently, when we had a defined user proceeds, we went to tourists in Queens Road that provided us five year unsecured convertible to venture at, at a premium valuation and reasonable cost to carry in order to finance the Borborema project financing that we did last year. Yeah, I mean, look, having access to capital is absolutely critical for a junior realty company. And and it's, it's, it's really a large part of the growth and more importantly, having that capital have the same view from a time horizon is also critical because if that capital has other objectives, then you can, you can run into trouble there as well. We've been lucky enough to have BD capital provide significant investments on the debt and the equity side. you know, provide a facility for us to allow to go out execute transactions and grow the business, you know, raise equity or convert some of those you know, convertibles into equity, continue to grow the business and, and do that over and over again. And also there's a really great fund manager name Adrian Day, that that is a great investor as well. So, but having good investors that understand your business and understand your vision and are aligned is, is critical. if you look at AAA really great company mid-tier in this business, Triple Flag. You know, how did they, how did they grow from being a junior to a, a big mid-tier? I don't know if they're the biggest mid-tier, but they're, they're getting pretty close if they're not. they have a cornerstone investor that, you know, basically wrote about $2 billion of checks and they have a great team and, you know, they executed very well, but it was, it was that capital that allowed them to be able to accelerate that growth. where, you know, you, you kind of have to work within the confines of the access to that capital and is your business matures, then some of that becomes less and less relevant when, when you have the cash flow profile and you can get the bigger facilities and so forth, then, you know, those, those kind of cornerstone investors, you know, are not, you know, they're still there and they're still supportive, but they're not necessarily as needed as they are to kind of get up, get, you know, start to grow and, and be able to kind of scale the business. But I mean, from, from a growth perspective in, in 2016, capital was pretty inexpensive even for small companies which, you know, wasn't like that are, you know, interest rates were down at zero basically. And the whole entire world was forced into this kind of speculation phase because they were earning nothing on their capital. So they were going into the junior markets and capital was cheap. Equity valuations were fairly high. And we're able to take advantage of that. So, you know, from kind of where our businesses are situated, you know, we need to kind of evolve with that because right in the middle of the last eight years like that changed and we went through one of the most rapid, you know, interest rate cycles to the other side. And when that happened, there was like a vacuum of capital that was guess what? It was sucked out of the sub 1 billion market cap companies and it wasn't just gold equities, it was, it was all juniors across all industries. And so, you know, as co cost of capital went up, you know, it makes it more difficult for the juniors to grow, you know, when you're looking at the really high quality assets that are out there and the big companies that do these transactions, like what is the average internal rate of return that they're doing these deals at? Usually it's like single digits II, I can, I can probably safely say that no one on the stage has a cost of capital in the single digits. So it's, it's, it's it's something that you really have to think about and you have to be very tactical in, in kind of, you know how you grow your business, how you scale when you are, when you really need to be aggressive, deploying capital and when sometimes you should be a little cautious, maybe one point to add, to add to res Brett's comments there on access to capital. And I think we've always had a philosophical view that some of the best opportunities come along at times in the market. When it's potentially distressed and equity valuations are low and cash is at a premium. And so we have part of the reason we have built the company in the way we have with a focus on cash flow from the beginning is to put ourselves and trying to build out the credit facility is to put ourselves in a position where when that period comes, we can actually take advantage of it and deploy capital. And I think if you go back and look at the space over the last 15 or 20 years, you can identify periods of two or three years where some of the best transactions were done on a returns basis because the markets, the equity markets were starved of capital. And when that scenario happens, it's probably going to be the same for us as a company. So we want to make sure that we are cash flow positive as possible. We have access to as much credit on our credit facility as possible so that we can actually take advantage of the cyclicality of the mining industry rather than being a victim of it. Absolutely. With you, Fred, quickly able to deploy whenever the opportunity presents itself. Well, we're over halfway through and I think it's time we now address the elephant in the room which is consolidation. I think we all know that one of the beauties of the royalty model, the business model is scalability. So as you get bigger, as you diversify assets get bigger, your cost of capital comes down, but also your G ratios come down, you get a premium multiple in the market and talking to a lot of people individually, they all say yes. The best way that we can grow is to consolidate. We have had some acquisitions obviously grow. You've done some the teller and nova and elemental. Of course, without us, it's no secret that everybody talks to each other all the time you're always exploring. Would this make sense? So my question is twofold. The first question is, how important do you think I'll say first of all bulk, but also consolidation is, and secondly, if it is important, why hasn't it happened? I'd say it has happened actually. you know, we did three deals over the course of 2021 when we had the currency to do that and it actually instigated quite a bit of consolidation. Fred's done the deal, bred stud the deal. And we've seen probably 11 or 12 royalty companies disappear over the course of the last three years and absorbed in, into bigger competitors. And I think it's inevitable that that consolidation will continue going forward. We saw trying to get absorbed recently. So there's likely to be more and the economic imperative that's driving that you've hit on it. Adrian is scale matters. scale creates liquidity, creates accessibility for generous investors. And I would say by and large, when you look at the global equity markets in that context, we don't have a mid-tier royalty company. We have large scale and then we have the smaller scale like ourselves. And I would put the cisco sandstorm. you know, in that category, even though they are in triple flag, they, even though they are larger, they're still relatively small cap in the global context. And to me, a mid-tier company is something in the 5 to $10 billion market cap category. That's big enough to be institutionally relevant, but still small enough to grow. As great as the category killers in our space are it's very difficult for them to grow. So I'm talking about the Francos and the Wheaton and the like are really very, very large and they're traded in multiple 2 to 3 times. Pe and nav arguably that implies that they have growth when they don't. And the reason they're able to capture that market share and capture the tension of equity investors is because there isn't an alternative in the mid-tier that can actually deliver growth. And I think when we create that mid-tier champion, we will start to capture a premium multiple. And there's an analogy for that in the producer universe. And I remember starting in Eco Eagle in 1998 and it was very much a similar landscape to what the royalty space is right now. And that you had big and Barrack and Newmont and then you had a collection of small cap producers. Nobody even approaching a million ounces of production. Nico Eagle. When I started, there was 90,000 ounces a year of production and $200 million market cap and Sean to his credit had a vision of creating a million ounces a year producer with no clear concept of how we were going to do it. But we got there after 12 years of building six mines, we were at 10 billion market cap a million ounces of production with 15% growth ahead of us. And we had a three times pe to NAV and Barrack and Newmont were struggling at about 1 to 1 and a quarter times because they didn't have growth here at suboptimal production rates. Impossible to grow off of that production base. I think we can create that kind of mid-tier champion in the royalty space. I think it'll happen because economically it's just too compelling. So does everybody think we should have more consolidation? Well, I think you've got to be a little bit careful. Otherwise we won't be able to have a panel in the future. But look, it's actually a cycle that's repeated itself in the royalty space. I think if you go back to 2012 to 2014, there were in the sub billion space approximately, I think eight deals. And I can see one of the founders of one of those companies here and it's, as Dave said, it's something that it's starting to repeat itself now. And there's been over 10 deals interestingly all again in the sub billion space. And I think that is largely driven by the benefits of scale. And you talk to look from our position. We did, we did a merger two years ago and I think we were public at the time in saying that we felt that was the first step and that if we were going to go down that path, it made sense logically to continue to look at opportunities where they made sense where they were recruited. I also think we learned through that merger that it's not always easy and that was a cross border merger and you've got tax and legal and structuring to work through with them. So it requires a lot of work and patience. But I think the benefits of it, certainly for us we've been able to see internally and an interesting sight when we did that merger, we had a lot of internal debate over the assets and the relative valuations of each asset and the outlook and looking back on it. Now, about two years later, I would say we were approximately 50 per cent right on those assets as to which would, how they would all. But the one thing we do know is that the combination through that we've actually been better because of it and we're in a stronger position today, more diversified portfolio and the other great thing and maybe I'm stealing a phrase here from Doug Silver. But it is the optionality that you create through doing a transaction like that, you don't know what doors it will open and what other opportunities it will present and you can't necessarily put a value on it. But, but that is a really significant factor in it. And I think as, as Dave said, there's, there's, there's clearly synergies, synergies between some of the the royalty companies in the sub space and, and the opportunity to create a real champion that has market relevance, size scale liquidity. Yeah, I would, I would agree with that last comment that Fred made, you know, consolidation just to try to get bigger is probably not going to be the best outcome. But finding, you know, parties that have synergies within your asset profile within your portfolio within management that we have that mutual benefit to, you know, create the one plus one equals three type situation I think is is, is a good thing and you know, again, it's, it's, it's a, it's a function of trying to figure out we're, we're all, you know, we're all trying to get to this next phase. You know, that's, that's the goal. You can't, there's not really a way to kind of go from junior to major, you go from junior to mid tier and then, you know, very few companies have ever been able to go from, I mean, each level is that much harder you look at, we got three, you know, 33 big royalty companies. so and Royal would save as 72. So, so it's, it's just, it's, it's understanding like, OK, we, we, that's the objective, I think that's the goal that's kind of the, the next stage for the business is, is like, how do you get there? So then you can continue to grow and scale the business from, from that standpoint. And if the, if the consolidation or an M and a transaction gets you there and it gets you there two or three or four or five years faster, I think it makes sense. And I think that you know, investors will see that if there are, you know, some benefits from a portfolio perspective on this company and some benefits from the other side and you put them together and they, you know, they balance each other out then that makes a lot of sense and also from a business perspective as well., you know, you don't, I don't think necessarily want to kind of convolute your business., and I think all of us have, you know, we all have slightly different strategies. We all have slightly different businesses and, you know, I think we're all up here today is because, you know, we're all really good at what we, you know, what we do. If we, if we weren't, then it creates vulnerabilities. And a lot of times that puts you in a position for your company to get taken over. So, you know, I think it's, it's, it's, you know, really from an asset perspective, like when you get down to it, like a merger is OK. Do the assets line up, would you, would you buy or merge with that company if you were just trying to finance and buy those assets? And if the answer is yes, then, then it probably makes sense. Good, good point. Good point. So let's start to look at your company specifically rather than at the industry. I've got three questions on your companies that I'd like each of you to answer. The first one is, can you tell people about what do you think is your, I guess we'll say a hidden gem, an asset in your company. But do you think is a great asset? But the market is just not recognizing. Do you want to start Dave, I'd be happy to and it's an easy question. To answer. I paid $200,000 for the royalty on the to project in Eastern Serbia, Europe's largest historic copper and gold producing region that royalty is now paid $11.5 million. And the N PV 00 discount rate of the future cash flows from the known resource. It exceeds a half a billion dollars and that is a great example of discovery optionality in the making. And we're just delighted with the rate of which Zen has gotten the metal out of the ground. And specifically, there's a very large porphyry zone at depth there called the lower zone. That's 2.5 billion tons at 0.86% copper and 0.16 g per ton gold phenomenal asset. That's an asset that we will build a mid tier and, and, and hopefully larger royalty company around with time. And that's the the biggest hidden gem within the portfolio. Fred one asset for us that we've always liked is and we're not able to say a lot about it, but it's the Lancefield underground mine in Western Australia. And this was in the 19 nineties, one of the top 10 underground gold mines in Australia 10,000 ounces per vertical meter. And the last time that asset was mined was in approximately 1999 and it's been through a series of different owners. And so it hasn't seen any work to date, but it is in the vicinity of two nearby mines. And our view has always been, it's a question of if not when the ownership there changes. And I think in the hands of an Australian mid tier or major that has the potential again to be a really, really material gold mine in western Australia. And we have a two per cent uncapped royalty over it. And one of the great things about the royalty model as Dave alluded to earlier, is there no holding cost for us involved on that asset? So it's a great royalty to have. And I think in our view, at some stage, a really focused owner is going to come in on that and we're probably going to see a lot of value created there. OK? At Empress, we talk a lot about the four producing assets. We have, we also have a development stage asset That's been on hold for quite a while. That's just changed ownership now. So we have a 1% royalty on Latinos project in Zacatecas, Mexico. So we're getting very excited about the potential there. You know, there's gonna be some drilling work, they've already raising funds for that. So that's something that we don't, haven't added any value to, haven't really talked about with this new change of ownership. I'm getting very excited about that opportunity. Well, I think we have to go with our flagship, which is a 3% NSR on a significant portion of the underground resource at Odyssey. We have about half of that resource covered under our current royalty coverage with significant exploration still to be conducted. The Hallmark of IGN Eco's history in the Abitibi region and I'm well aware of it because I spent 12 years there is that as they gain access for production, they get underground drill setups and they drill the piss out of their deposits and they grow them. And Laron is, it is an excellent example of that. Laron from surface exploration was a small localized zinc RV MS. But as we sank the penne shaft and gained underground access to balloon to one of the biggest goal bearing B MS has ever discovered in history. We see that obviously potential in the underground at Odyssey and we have significant coverage there. We also have significant coverage on much of the contiguous land around the Odyssey Complex and the Malar Complex and that's an industrial complex. It'll be significantly underutilized as a convert from open pit to underground production will go down from 55,000 tons a day to about 19,000 tons a day. So it behooves them to do a lot of near surface exploration within haulage distance of that complex. And we have a lot of royalty coverage around that area as well. OK. I'm gonna give you two, but I'll make them fast. So from a near term perspective, we own a is actually one of the second transactions that we did. We bought a, a producing royalty from a portfolio from core mining on this, a stream called or on a mine called Endeavor in Australia. This, this produced, it gave us our money back a little return and it's been on care maintenance for about five or six years. It was picked up by an Aussie listed company and they just announced that they're fully financed to put that asset back in production and that asset is expected on an annualized basis to kick off an additional kind of 2500 to 3000 gold equivalent ounces a year. And they've got a mine plan going out 10 years, although it's, it's a little bit tailing off towards the end of that, but that's going to provide a very significant jump. You know, in fact, like almost a double of our gold production guidance for for this year. from a long term perspective, we're still very, very, very excited about Goslin Goslin and COTE this, I mean, COTE is going to it's the third largest gold mine in Canada. And right, besides the third largest gold mine in Canada, they made a discovery with the deposit that looks like it's probably going to be