Gold Royalty Corp. (AMEX:GROY) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

It’s primarily a gold-focused portfolio and a few of these assets do have underlying resources. But for the most part, they are earlier exploration stage, but I’ll reiterate, they’re great operating partners, well-funded operating partners to explore these assets and then prolific mining jurisdictions, a long trend with significant assets such as the Detour Lake Mine or near Val-d’Or, near like to Canadian Malartic, Quebec and that prolific district as well. As part of the consideration, SOQUEM is entitled for 50% of any potential buybacks or milestone payments that still leaves Gold Royalty with net CAD9.1 million in potential proceeds, again, relative to a $1 million purchase price, a very attractive tuck-in and creative way to continue to grow our portfolio.

Now moving on to the organic growth associated with the portfolio. I wanted to dive into some of the key assets and some of the advancements we saw in Q3. At Odyssey, Agnico Eagle has continued to aggressively explore the Odyssey South deposit, specifically infill drilling at the internal zones, which a majority of those are towards the north of Odyssey South, between the Odyssey North and Odyssey South deposit, which lies underneath our royalty coverage area. So we’re very bullish on Agnico, delineating a larger resource of the internal zones, and they’ve continually emphasized that the internal zones represent upside to increase production from the underground during the transition period. The transition period being 2024 to 2028 when the Canadian Malartic complex shifts from open pit to underground, it’s currently operating as both an open pit and underground operation.

The key high-grade deposit at the Canadian Malartic complex is still East Gouldie, which does lie to the south of Gold Royalty’s royalty coverage area. However, I note that, their exploration is focused along strike to the east and west to extend that East Gouldie mineralization. To the west, they’ve seen significant drilled results near the Norrie Zone, which is actually underneath the Gold Royalty coverage area. So we’re quite excited to see that East Gouldie style mineralization starting to appear under the Gold Royalty coverage area. To the East, albeit it is quite a bit further there, drilling towards our Midway royalty, and they have been drilling across the Midway property as well. And this is a massive, massive mineral system, and we’re very excited to see the potential for that East Gouldie style mineralization trend to the east towards our 1.5% NSR at Midway.

At Cote, David mentioned, construction as of September 30th was approximately 92% complete, targeting 5 million tonnes of stockpile by the end of the year and on track for initial production in early 2024. Our 0.75% NSR, as a reminder to everyone, covers the southern edge of the Cote pit. Importantly, the southern portion of the Cote pit is where the high-grade mineralization is occurring near surface. This means, that we expect to have increased attributable coverage at Cote over the early years of the mine life, where IAMGOLD is focused on that high-grade portion of mineralization. And we do expect to see our coverage taper off towards the end of the mine life. However, this increased coverage in the early years increases our expected revenue and cash flows from Cote starting immediately next year.

Based on estimates of the technical production — technical report production schedule at Cote, consensus commodity prices and our estimate of coverage there, we can expect between $3 million and $4 million in revenue from Cote immediately next year, which will directly translate to bottom line cash flow growth. The REN project is continuing to be highlighted by Barrick as the future of the Carlin Complex. They had updated press release in September of this year, outlining all of the growth opportunities across Barrick’s vast portfolio and REN was highlighted as a potential opportunity to supplement the 10-year mine plan at Carlin. They outlined a potential doubling in the current resource of 1.6 million ounces, bringing over 3 million ounces in total, potentially next year.

And they’re targeting an advanced mining study of pre-feasibility study over the next two years. Fenelon, in June of this year, we saw an inaugural PEA on the project with a 12.3-year mine life and annual production of 212,000 ounces. Our 2% NSR covers all mineralization that’s incorporated in that mine plan. The company has continued their drilling and exploration efforts across the project and recently appointed Brian Penny as their Interim CEO. We’re encouraged by the continued advancement of the project. They’re not immune to the difficulties that most small-cap advanced exploration companies have faced, but that really does not discredit the technical merits of Fenelon and the jurisdiction that it’s located in just 70 kilometers the east of the Detour Lake mine.