Greg Barnes: Mark, it’s Greg Barnes from TD Securities. And I may as well open up the hall as Nelson ask you about M&A. With — if the proposed deal between Newmont and Newcrest goes ahead, there will be market cap on the face that will be double — you. Production will be double Barrick. Do you care strategically about that scale and how big they would become and probably, grab a lot of mind share globally from investors?
Mark Bristow: Well, I’ve never seen that logic work, by the way, because as you know, in mining, it doesn’t fit with this question of — that used to be asked by you, too, haven’t you got too many assets. So getting big for the sake of getting big doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Certainly with my money, and I believe our shareholders wouldn’t like that either. Growing the business is absolutely our focus, and so we are obsessed about growing our business and growing the value, so that you can take as a given. We can’t see much strategic benefit in just getting big for big mistake, and we don’t agree with you that that builds a better company with more gravitas. In fact, I believe it’s probably adds more risk. So that’s really the way we look at it, and we’re going to watch with interest how this thing progresses.
Greg Barnes: And if I listened to you correctly, during your — what you were talking about on the copper side, you pick various areas of the world where you think you want to focus. Is that where you would be leaning towards more on the M&A front, or is that going to be an exploration focus for you?
Mark Bristow: Both. I think the interesting thing, to your point — well, to the point I made earlier and that is that there’s a whole lot of people running around promoting metals, new modern metals, including copper. The real geological and mining skill and knowledge associated with those promotions are quite thin. So — and like the gold industry, the copper industry is equally in a bad place when it comes to inventory, haven’t invested in the future. You look again the results coming out now from these diversified huge amounts of money being made, but you can’t take all that money and invest it in, like, with magic and find these big deposits. It takes time. And we have been working on it for four years. You’ll see going through this year, us pop up with new consolidated positions right in the heart of elephant country.
And so right now, the opportunity to grow organically, if I — is certainly in our business a preferred way because of the inventory rebuilding, but that doesn’t say we won’t pick up on an acquisition opportunity, if it arises. And again, we — as you know, we’re much more skilled as geologists and miners as most of our peers. And so we have a much better capacity to call a project early and take more risk on M&A then wait for the stuff to be tired and having produced a long time and everyone is running out of options so we run it up and buy them. So that’s really — that’s the way we would position our strategy.
Greg Barnes: Just one more question. Would you take that a step further. There are several big copper gold development projects in South America, Josemaria, for example. They need a joint venture partner. Would that be something Barrick would do?
Mark Bristow: Yes. Theoretically, absolutely. Destination is quite important. Even though I’d say asset quality overrides destination, but again, you’ve seen us exercise sometimes to the frustration of bankers to walk away from certain assets because we’re not prepared to go beyond an already extraordinary premium. But absolutely, that’s our preferred route, and we have ongoing conversations in Kevin’s team on those opportunities all the time.
Ralph Profiti: Thank you. Thanks, Mark. This is Ralph Profiti from Eight Capital. Mark, does the Dorothy discovery change your thinking on how that gets rolled into Fourmile and then present it into Nevada Gold Mines, right? Is this a — does it push it back a little bit, prove up the value, which you want to sort of present that value proposition to Newmont? How does that discovery change that thing? Because I know that there’s a structured approach on how that specific assets get rolled into NGM.
Mark Bristow: So it’s a very simple approach, and it’s very interesting, and we have open conversations with Newmont on these things. But — so we have the final say and when it goes in, and it goes in on a formula. So if we don’t meet that formula and with Fourmile, it’s a simple formula because of the quality of those deposits. Once we roll it in from the start, we get everything back. So we split the whole cost of feasibility and all that, and then the value of that asset goes in at a market value, recognizing premier in the market and the whole gambit. So there’s no real logic for anyone not to participate in developing the project because ultimately, it’s in the best interest of the joint venture. We can also carve up Fourmile.
We can put in some, keep some out, whatever. The opportunity to evaluate these deposits — the opportunity to value — I don’t know why everyone wants to see me, they can just tell me. So the opportunity to fully comprehensively evaluate these types of ore bodies, you have to get underground to drill it because it’s a 1.5 kilometer stretch from the surface. So again, under the joint venture, we can share infrastructure and we can invest in infrastructure from established infrastructure in Goldrush to continue to evaluate these projects or we can come up with something else in agreement with our partners. And then on top of that, the real opportunity in this Fourmile development is, if we continue — if what we are seeing materializes into what we expected to do, we can access it from the other side, from the northern side.
And again, we’ve learned a lot in developing Goldrush because if we accessed it, we had access with a long underground haulage that takes it out right at the smelter at the roaster. And so — because getting it out in the mountains there like we do with Goldrush, then you’ve still got to transport it somewhere. So we see that — and that ability gives us — it significantly changes our 15-year plan, because it puts a whole slug of production at the back end of our 10-year plan, and it lifts everything up. So strategically, that’s what we really — this is early days, but it’s — for me, it’s — there are two things out of this. This is very significant. When you see those — and we’ve got hits around there and some of them, they’ll go, this is Carlin country, 1,000 grams a tonne.
It’s a real stuff, and it’s all breccias. So Fourmile is much higher grade than Goldrush. It’s the same structure, but it’s — there’s a big intrusion and the Oriole has sort of metamorphosed the rock, and so it’s very brittle. So the mineralization is breaking it up. You’ve got these big breccias. And so the first thing is, our — the fact that we’ve got the geologists to think like modeling and take these big decisions to drill these deep holes way ahead of where you found the lost one. And so this opens up and now we want to look across the intrusion as well — big intrusion because that structure continues through. And then it also — I’ve just been down there last week, what it does is, it motivate our geologists for other targets, because we’ve got some significant targets that we’re developing.
And it’s really — this is a product of our — the team’s ability to vector these big geothermal halos and get into the heart of mineralization. So for me, as — and again, you’ve seen us, we’ve been consolidating ground all around our already large landholding. So we’re — I mean, I’m super excited about the opportunity because fundamentally, Nevada hasn’t seen real exploration for a long time. And you’ve seen us replace — I mean, we’ve mined 10 million ounces there, 9 million ounces since — in the four years. We’ve paid out over $6 billion to shareholders, and we’ve replaced all the gold that we mined. So this is — that doesn’t happen often. And I think there’s the common theme across Barrick is, look what we’re doing. We haven’t — and when we put those two assets together, neither of them had a future.
Barrick had better grade, but had no future plan, and Newmont’s assets were on the decline. People have given up. We know that because we had to fix the infrastructure. They had completely given up.
Ralph Profiti : Thanks for that. And I also want to ask you a question on Mali and the mining audit. What has come out of those discussions? What do you anticipate to come out of those discussions because you talked about Papua New Guinea in the context of jurisdiction? How are you thinking about Mali right now?
Mark Bristow : I’ve always said, people ask me, what’s your riskiest jurisdiction in your portfolio? For my whole 30 years, I’ve said, Mali. But Mali has delivered more value than any other asset in any other country, because we had Morila before. And so this audit has been run by people who we know really well. These are professional people. This is not a gauge attempt. People out of Senegal, who we know from our Senegal investments, and again, I gave a talk because the question has been asked by the current regime is, does gold glitter for all Malians. That’s the question. And so it’s up to us as miners and certainly, we’re 10% of the GDP. So, the conversation with the finance business is always very short, and we actually are a core component of the Malian budget every year, the Barrick investment.
And so everyone’s got a view and their whisper start, but right now, we don’t see that at all. And we’ve been through three military regimes, a pile of incompetent civilian governments, but we’ve always come out because we pay big dividends and large amounts of tax, and we employ Malians. And we’ve got no expatriates in our executive team in Mali, either in the capital or on the mine. So, we manage that — and I was there just a couple of — two weeks ago as part of my quarterly visit, met with everyone. We bring it up and my encouragement is, if you look at what the mining has done, and there’s no question about that amongst anyone, its contribution to developing that very poor country. So, what about — shouldn’t we be thinking about all these revisions to the mining code and whether it’s actually brought anything.
And isn’t it better to — in the face of all the challenges reach out and encourage more investment because the one thing about Mali is the investment keeps coming in or has in the past because your money is considered safe because the Malians haven’t changed the rules like other countries. But certainly, there’s a determination to understand and measure the rules and also there’s a big mistrust between the junta and the past civilian governments and some of the transactions that were done in that regime. And so this is good — if it’s done for the right reasons, it’s a good thing because it will uncover if there was any null administration. And otherwise, it will give something more fundamental, which we can share with the people of Mali about the contribution of the mining industry.
