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Operator
My name is Michelle and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the Sandstorm Gold Royalties 2022 Fourth Quarter and Annual Financial Results conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. Please be aware that some of the commentary may contain forward-looking statements. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate and as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number one on your touchtone phone. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the star, then the number two. Thank you. Mr. Watson, you may begin your conference.
Michelle
Thank you, Michelle. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for calling into this 2022 Q4 and year-end earnings call. Over the last 12 months, Sandstorm has achieved several transformative milestones, which started with the creation of our strategic partner that we will be growing with, Horizon Copper, along with the sale of our hot modern interest to Horizon and taking back of a pure gold stream on the hot modern asset, making Sandstorm a pure play precious metal streaming company. And then we finished the year by making acquisitions of approximately $1 billion for new streams and royalties to transform Sandstorm into a world-class streaming company with not only industry-leading diversification, but also industry-leading quality with respect to operating costs underlying those mines. It truly was a transformational year, and before I turn it over to Irfan to go through the financial statements, I'll provide a brief corporate update and answer some of the common questions we are getting from shareholders to take a look at where our business is now and where we're going over the next year. As part of our annual internal process, we make a one-year budget approved by the Board of Directors for the current year plan, along with a five-year financial plan based on information from our operating partners. And we have recently completed that internal process, and I'd like to quickly show a graph of what that means in terms of our new portfolio's ability to generate cash flow. Only two years ago, Our portfolio is generating $76 million per year before G&A. You can see here that Santorum's portfolio is expected to generate nearly $150 million this year when including repayments by Horizon under its cash suites from Antonina. With this amount growing to over $180 million per year once Greenstone and Hod Modern and a couple of other assets are complete construction. And this is only using $1,750 gold prices. which is not only below the current spot price, but well below what I'm expecting gold prices to increase to over the next several years. For our Canadian investors, this works out to approximately a quarter of a billion dollars a year of cash flow per year Canadian. Now, as you know, we try to make acquisitions first with available credit before we consider equity, and therefore we took on some debts to complete these acquisitions in 2022. Originally, we took on over $600 million U.S. of debt, but then through a combination of small equity financing and using cash flow from operations, we have already had that debt paid down to approximately $487 million as of today and dropping quickly. Even with the Fed increasing interest rates, and even with those interest rates, if they stay high for another couple of years, you can see on this slide that in the absence of any further gold stream acquisitions, we see debt coming down very quickly and being fully extinguished sometime towards the end of 2026 or beginning of 2027. And again, this is using 1750 gold and 375 copper. And if commodity prices stay where they are today or go up, this debt will get paid off even more quickly, which is what I expect will happen. Based on the questions that we'll get from shareholders, there are a handful of other items that I'd like to quickly answer and then hand it over to Irfan for the detailed results. The first of those questions relates to growth or acquisitions versus debt repayment, and what is our priority, and what exactly do we see over the next couple of quarters and beyond? To be extremely candid, with the Fed having hiked interest rates at an unprecedented rate and with them continuing to hike rates, it's my belief that debt repayment is likely the most intelligent allocation of capital. When I look at our potential acquisitions, there's only one small gold stream that we are looking at, which we could do without raising any equity, And outside of that potential gold stream, for which I believe the probability of landing is low, we plan on aggressively paying down our debt so that we can both save on interest, but also so that over time we can recharge our balance sheet. If 2022 was the year of aggressive transformation, I think 2023 and perhaps 2024 will be the years of calm consolidation, where we take time to pay down our debt, consider the odd small stream, to work with horizons, watch them build themselves up, and to start looking at long-lead deals together with Horizon for the future. Such deals, of course, being with Horizon buying copper mining interests and Sandstorm buying gold streams on those mines at the time of acquisition. Speaking of Horizon, that brings me to the next question that investors have been asking, which is when will Horizon complete raising its next $20 million and hand that over to Sandstorm to complete the Antamina transaction, whereby Sandstorm will sell its NPI on Antamina to Horizon, and have Sandstorm take back its silver stream in Antimena, its 0.55% MPI royalty on Antimena, and the IOU from Horizon. It's my understanding that Horizon has selected a capital provider for the $20 million and is now just working through the details, and as soon as that transaction is closed, Horizon will pay Sandstorm the $20 million, which we will use to repay debt, and then the Antimena transaction will automatically be completed as anticipated. I expect this will take another one or two months for this to be completed, but the closing should be fairly straightforward, and from what I can see, it should be a fait accompli. The third thing I want to talk about, which is not so much a question from investors as it is a statement by me of a commitment to investors, is I plan on being much more involved in direct communication and plan on being abnormally candid with how I see things unfolding going forward. In 2023, I'm going to implement some new changes that will result in me providing more information through videos, et cetera, directly to investors, as well as more formal feedback mechanisms for investors to provide their thoughts to me and Sandstorm's management team. I won't dwell on this on the earnings call, but we have an incredible investor base that is not only intelligent, it is also diverse in its opinions. And I believe our company can and will be better if I share more regularly what we are seeing as a management team and what we're thinking about, and if we pay more attention to the variety of feedback that we receive when our investors may disagree, even if they disagree with each other. I believe our management team will make better decisions that way. Finally, before I turn it back over to Irvan, I want to make a brief comment about Sandstorm's 2022 share price performance relative to peers, and especially relative to our royalty mid-cap peers. A year ago, Sandstorm was the only royalty mid-cap peer trading above NAV, with both Triple Flight and Cisco trading near or below NAV. As I mentioned, 2022 was a transformative year for Sandstorm, and I'm very proud of what we achieved. Having said that, Sandstorm is by a mile the largest part of my personal network, and it was disappointing for me and I'm sure for other shareholders to see our peer share prices have outperformed us during 2022. And if you now look at where we are trading relative to them, Sandstorm is the only material precious metals royalty company trading below NAV. Why? As you know, share prices don't only trade on fundamentals. They also trade based on supply and demand of shares. And candidly, the demand for virtually all shares in the world of all companies decreased in 2022 as the Fed started its quantitative tightening and increasing interest rates. And there were a few exceptions. But generally speaking, companies, including Sandstorm and our investors, such as myself, had to take the pain of that decreased demand for shares. resulting in downward pressure on our share price. At the same time, Sandstorm had to issue shares for the transactions. For example, when we announced the acquisition of Nomad, despite our shareholders loving this deal and voting overwhelmingly in favor of it, the shares that we issued to Nomad shareholders were almost immediately sold, putting downward pressure on the stock, which was exacerbated when we issued some equity to take the pressure off of our debt load. That's the bad news. The good news is that we have been meeting with a number of what I would call large, and fundamental long-term investors over the past six months who have been informing us that they have begun building positions in Sandstorm, including some very large pension plans in Canada as well as some large institutional investors in the U.S. The good news is that they are now a source of demand for our shares going forward, and I can confidently say we do not plan on issuing shares in 2023. So it's my hope that the demand, supply, and balance in Sandstorm shares is in the process of swinging the other way, And I do believe that in the same way we underperformed our peers in 2022, we will equally outperform them in 2023. We've built an amazing company over the years, and I'm confident that our share price will begin to reflect that. And with that, I'll hand it over to Irfan for the detailed results. Irfan.
Michelle
Thanks, Nolan. And thank you to everyone who is joining us today. 2022 was an exciting and busy year at Sandstorm with some truly transformational corporate development activities. I'd like to take a few moments and walk through the financial results for both the fourth quarter and year end. If you're joining us on the webcast today, I'll turn your attention to the first slide where we charted Sandstorm's year-over-year production and revenue results. I'm pleased to report that in 2022, Sandstorm not only achieved its guidance comfortably, but also broke a number of records, including revenue, operating cash flow, and attributable gold equivalent production. The company sold over 82,000 gold equivalent ounces and realized revenues of $148.7 million. Compared to the full year of 2021, that's an increase of 22% and 29%, respectively. These increases in production and revenue are reflective of some of the new assets acquired during the year, namely the Nomad Royalty and Base Core portfolio acquisitions. We'll look at the top contributing assets for the year in just a moment. The chart on the right-hand side of this slide highlights the company's average realized selling price of gold per ounce year over year. Despite a struggling commodities market in the latter half of the year, The yearly average of $17.95 per gold ounce is relatively consistent with the past few years. 2022 was certainly an interesting year with rapidly rising interest rates and concerns of an impending recession. I believe that a lot of macroeconomic factors are bullish signs for the long-term price of gold, and I rest assured that Sandstrom's strong portfolio is ready to benefit from rising gold and commodity prices. The next slide provides a bit more detail on the year-end highlights. Total revenue of $148.7 million consisted of $97.8 million in revenue from the company's stream sales and $15.9 million from royalty revenue. The average cash cost per tributal ounce for the year was $284, resulting in cash operating margins of $1,511 per tributal ounce. Sandstorm achieved a new record and milestone, generating nearly $110 million in cash flow from operating activities, excluding change in non-cash working capital. That's a 32% increase from the full year of 2021. Annual net income was also a new record for the company, coming in at $78.5 million for the full year, a few factors driving the increase in net income when compared to 2021. included a $25.8 million gain on the disposal of streams royalties under interest, primarily from the sale of a portfolio to Sandbox Royalties, a new diversified metals royalty company that was created in partnership with Equinox Gold in June 2022. There was also a $24.9 million gain and a $12.5 million gain resulting from the sale of the company's equity interests in the Hot Modern Project and in Entrez Resources to Horizon Copper. Net income was partially offset by an increase in depletion expense, largely due to an increase in attributable gold production, an increase in financing expense related to the interest paid on the company's revolving credit facility, which was drawn down to finance part of the transactions I mentioned earlier. Looking at the fourth quarter results, the company sold over 21,700 attributable gold quill ounces, and realized revenues of $38.4 million. This represents an increase of 31% and 29% respectively when compared to the same period in 2021. The average cash cost per trivial ounce for the fourth quarter was $253, resulting in cash operating margins of $1,493 per trivial ounce. Cash flow from operating activity excluding changes in non-cash working capital was nearly $30 million for the quarter. The company had a net loss of $2.1 million in the fourth quarter, largely driven by an increase in depletion expense and financing expense that I mentioned earlier. On the next slide, we see a breakdown of Tribal Gold equivalent ounces sold from our top producing assets over the course of 2022. When I look at this list and see the diversification in quality assets here, I'm encouraged to see how far Sandstone's portfolio has developed in the last few years. In fact, nearly 30% of production from these top producing streams and royalties came from assets that Sandstone purchased within the last 24 months. Our technical and corporate development teams have been working incredibly hard to strengthen Sandstone's portfolio, not just in terms of overall production, but also in the quality and diversification of the underlying assets. What I find more exciting is how different this list will look in the next few years. We have several new assets expected being cashed along to Sandstorm between now and the next few years, including Greenstone and the Platte Reef projects and, of course, Hot Modern. These assets, along with others, will further strengthen Sandstorm's production profile. Some of the more recent additions to the list include the Bonacrom Blibor Gold Stream, the Antonin and Catherine Royalties, and an additional streaming agreement on the Mercedes Mine, all of which were acquired as part of the Nomad and BaseCorp transactions. The three months ended December 31st with the full first quarter that these assets were cash flowing to Sandstone post the closing of the transactions. Sandstorm continues to receive the full payment from the 1.66% Antimina NPI royalty until the second part of the Horizon Copper transaction completes, which, as Nolan mentioned earlier, is expected to occur in the first half of this year. Once the transaction is complete, Sandstorm will hold the 1.66% Silverstream with Horizon Copper on the Antimina asset, as well as one-third of the residual NPI royalty. This final slide provides a breakdown of the company's 2022 production in terms of jurisdiction and commodity type. 37% of attributable gold equivalent production came from assets located in North America, with 16% located in Canada. Nearly half of Sanstron production came from assets located in South America, with the remaining production coming from assets in other parts of the world. Sandstorm retains a precious metal focused company with 70% of its 2022 production coming from precious metals. We continue to have good exposure to copper as well, making up the majority of the 25% gold equivalent production from base metal assets. Based on the company's existing streams and royalties, we are forecasting attributable gold ounces of between 85 and 100,000 ounces in 2023. And with that, I'll turn things over to Dave for updates on some of our assets. Dave? Great. Thanks, Irfan. For this quarter, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the development pipeline and the amount of capital being put into some of the larger and smaller projects of our partners. In slide 15, you'll see a list of assets that are currently being built or commissioned. You will also see the total capital to be spent on those projects until they start producing and the date of the expected start. As a reminder, Sandstorm has made all of its payments for this list of development assets and now awaits the beginning of cash flow. The first thing that should be noticed from the list is the number of assets that are hovering at or above the $1 billion mark of total capital cost. Equinox's Greenstone just gave a recent update that they are 70% completion rate, with the first production expected in just about one year's time. Ivanhoe has given an update on capital spending on phase one of Plat Reef, and that is expected to begin operating in 2024, but are also beginning the phase two expansion of the project by starting construction of shaft two. And of course, Uyutogoy is now fully in the hands of Rio Tinto, continues to develop on the block caves lift 0 and 1 on Hugo North, eventually making it to the Hugo North extension of the JBE ground in 2027 or 2028. No less important than these, but much lower overall capex spend, is Hadmanan, which continues down the early works projects. Having received full permits for construction, the operators are looking to finalize the project financing. and complete the last of the property acquisition required for the mill site construction. Robertson, in the Cortez trends in the hands of Nevada gold mines, doesn't specify the amount of capital being spent, but the project adjacent to current pipeline operations continues to grow with current resources of greater than 2 million ounces and potential for more than a million ounces on top of that, and has a schedule of getting into production spending permits in 2027. Not to be forgotten are some of the smaller projects, like Coringa, which began to pay on the royalty late last year and has some very high-grade underground systems that may have good potential for long life. Also in this category is Bayamhunde, which your dean has now found a good Mongolian partner to help develop a modest-sized project, but will likely be quite profitable and we believe could extend its mine life rather dramatically over time. I guess the point that I'm trying to make with this list is that there are multiple billions of dollars being spent on our pipeline of growth. And for us, that pipeline is already paid for, but we still get the benefit of our partners building these very high-quality projects that will add to our already impressive portfolio. Not included on this list are other assets like Lobo Market, Barrie, Copper Mountain, Chapada Suruca Deposit, and the Mara Project. Each one of these assets are expected to start producing on a royalty or streaming area of interest, but have yet to solidify timelines. Yet, each should be significant contributors to Sandstorm's future cash flows. That's the benefit of owning a company like Sandstorm, the diversity and breadth of our portfolio It's so extensive that there are always huge sums of capital being spent to progress the asset base to purport to production. A huge testament to the effectiveness of the strategy we have pursued to grow the company. So with that, I'll pass over the call to Michelle, the operator, for Q&A. Please feel free to ask any questions about any of our royalties and streams.
Operator
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press star followed by the one on your touchtone phone. You will hear a three-tone prompt acknowledging your request. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press the star followed by the two. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift the hands up for pressing any keys. One moment please for your first question. First question comes from Derek Ma, TD Securities. Please go ahead.
Derek Ma
Good morning, and thank you. I'm looking at the four-year outlook on one of your presentations, and we have 140,000 ounces GEOs in 2025, but then a step down to 122,000 in 2026. You know, appreciating that this likely changed by the time we get there, but could you walk us through what's behind the drop-off in 2026? Thank you.
Michelle
Yeah, it's Nolan here.
Michelle
There's a handful of smaller things that are some of our shorter-life mines. I mean, right now our average mine life is getting close to 20 years, but that's comprised of some really long mine lives and some shorter ones, and a few of the shorter ones drop off in those years.
Michelle
And to add to that... Sorry, I meant to add to that.
Michelle
It's a little bit of an unexpected step down in Saramaro as well in that year.
Derek Ma
Saramaro, okay. And is Falco's Horn 5 included in that four-year outlook?
Michelle
Sorry, I couldn't hear that. Sorry, is Falco's Horn 5 included in that four-year outlook?
Derek Ma
No, it's not. No, it's not. Okay. And if I had to ask another question, a lot of your competitors have been talking about bilateral deals. Can you talk about the role of bilateral discussions in your strategy and pipeline and how you could leverage your partnerships with Horizon and Handbox as part of those discussions?
Michelle
Yeah, so I guess if I understand you correctly, you're asking sort of our strategic partners including Horizon and what the role will be for those transactions. If I were to broadly classify the type of competition that we see in our industry, I would say it's fairly high. Typical IRRs for just plain vanilla streams that are highly competitive or fairly low that our counterparties are doing. I don't believe that that's a good business model to just sit there and play the game of highest bidder wins, therefore lowest IRR wins. Our job as a management team is to get good rates of return for our shareholders in a long period of time. And so we're trying to work hard with bilateral partners, Horizon specifically, to find situations where they can go out and acquire a strategic mind and we can be a large source of the capital to allow them to do that, but us just buying the gold stream at the time of acquisition, and then we would be working hand-in-hand with them where they would not be phoning Franklin, Nevada, or Royal Gold, or Wheaton, or the other parties, so that the rate of return that we would get would be much higher than the average rate of return on pure gold streams that our competitors are getting in the industry. So that's the plan.
Derek Ma
And is the expectation that those would be near-production assets? or development assets?
Michelle
Yeah, I would say virtually all of the things that we're looking at are assets that are currently operating.
Michelle
Great. Thank you very much.
Operator
Thank you. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you do have a question, please press star 1 at this time.
Michelle
There are no further questions at this time. I'll turn the call back to you for closing remarks.
Michelle
All right. Well, thank you, Michelle. Thanks, everyone, for phoning in again. And I appreciate it. It's a busy morning with lots of earnings calls, so I appreciate you calling in. And I hope everyone has a good day.
Michelle
And likewise, we'll be here to answer questions if anyone has any follow-up questions throughout the day.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude your conference call for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your lines.
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