Royal Gold, Inc. (NASDAQ:RGLD) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

And then, if you look at our size versus our peers, that’s quite material for us. So, we like that part of the market right now. We’re also seeing quite a few smaller, I’d say, earlier stage royalties, $10 million to $30 million kind of sizing. And again, I think that’s related to the equity being challenged right now. We’re very busy. We have been very busy looking at a number of opportunities and really leaning on the technical team to try to identify those opportunities, those land packages that have upside. So, that’s been busy for us. And then, the third bucket, smaller bucket is M&A. And we have seen a few opportunities where streaming has been considered to help an operator acquire an asset or acquire a company. And so, that’s been interesting as well.

And I’d say that’s kind of popped up here in the last, say, six months or so as the third bucket. That’s kind of what we’re seeing right now. I think we like the pipeline, primarily over primary gold assets, but we have seen a few base metal opportunities with precious metal byproducts as well. We like that, obviously, the longer mine lives, it fits our product very well. So hopefully, that helps you with a bit of color in the market.

Cosmos Chiu: Yes, it does. So, thanks again, Bill, Martin, Mark and Dan for answering all my questions. And congrats on a very successful 2022.

Operator: Our next question comes from Lawson Winder with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Lawson Winder: Hello gentlemen. Thank you for the update today. I wanted to ask one or two questions, at least one on ESG. So first of all, congratulations on publishing your first ESG report last year. I look forward to the new one coming this year. I certainly think those reports can help with the rankings. But I wanted to kind of get your thoughts on that a little bit, just given that the royalty streamers in general, but Royal Gold as well continues to kind of lag the miners in terms of improvements in ESG scores with the various scoring companies. Bill, I’d love to get your thoughts on what you think the industry, but in particular, Royal Gold can do to improve that.

Bill Heissenbuttel: Given that — Lawson thanks for that. Given the nature of our business, I can’t look at the scores and say, well, I think we can go — we can get it improved with Sustainalytics or improve with MSCI. I mean, I think we’re already ranked AA like number two or three amongst the gold sector, and one, our Sustainalytics score has improved quite a bit over the past few years. And I think the other thing is that because we’re such a unique business, sometimes the questions we get from these firms sort of paint us as a mining company, and then we can’t answer the question the way they want us to and that sometimes can impact our score. So, I’m happy with where the scores are. I’m very happy with the improvement we’ve seen over the past few years. I just — I can’t really give you a path forward as to how we would take concrete steps to improve it. But we’re always in discussions with them. So, always trying to learn more about how they do their rankings.

Lawson Winder: Now, the next report, when approximately can we expect that? And what sort of new details might we expect?