Equinox Gold Corp (TSX: EQX) and Orla Mining (TSX: OLA) have entered into an agreement for an at-market combination to create a new North American senior gold producer.

The combined entity, which will carry the Equinox name, is expected to have a market capitalisation of US$18.5 billion and annual production of 1.1 million ounces of gold from six mines in Canada, the US, Mexico and Nicaragua, with an organic pathway to 1.9Mozpa.

The larger Equinox expects to be the second-largest producer of Canadian gold behind Agnico Eagle Mines (TSX: AEM) from the Greenstone, Valentine and Musselwhite mines.

The two will combine via a plan of arrangement with Orla shareholders to receive one Equinox share and US0.01c for each share held, giving them 33% of the enlarged company.

The merged company expects to generate free cashflow of around US$1.4 billion this year, based on analyst consensus estimates and is expected to have US$1.4 billion in liquidity.

Equinox CEO Darren Hall will retain his role, with Orla CEO Jason Simpson to join the company as president.

Orla chair Chuck Jeannes will join Equinox as chair with continued support from current Equinox chair Ross Beaty as chair emeritus.

‘Icing on the cake’

Beaty described today as a momentous day for Equinox.

“Just over eight years ago, we began our journey to build Equinox Gold,” he said on a conference call on Wednesday.

“From the beginning, we had one big goal – to build a great new gold company at scale.

“Why have we focused on scale? Because it creates better resilience and diversification against risk, better valuation multiples, better liquidity, a stronger financial condition, and, most importantly, greater leverage to gold.”

The deal with Orla marks Equinox’s fourth deal since 2018 and follows on from last year’s combination with Calibre Mining Corp.

“We built mines. We’ve sold mines that were non-core, and we’ve spun out three companies, each with over US$1 billion in market value today,” Beaty said.

“The Orla deal will add icing on the Equinox cake.”

Both companies were asked about the timing of the deal.

“If we consider both companies, we’ve both got credible operations, we’ve both got a clear platform to grow, we believe we’re both equally undervalued in the space,” Hall said.

“Both sets of shareholders will benefit from the continued re-rate that will come from demonstrated delivery of both asset bases, the growth that comes from it, and then the additional re-rate that comes as a consequence of size.”

Simpson said the deal accelerated both companies’ existing growth stories.

“Often we were complimented on our platform, but in the same conversation, the patience of waiting for that platform to unfold was a question that I would get, and so this satisfies an accelerated growth platform that I think will be to the benefit of both of our groups of shareholders,” he said.

Growth projects include the Valentine phase 2 expansion in Canada, South Railroad and Castle Mountain in the US, and Los Filos and Camino Rojo underground in Mexico.

Both companies’ shareholders will vote on the deal in July.

Directors and management of Orla, Pierre Lassonde, and certain affiliates of Fairfax Financial Holdings, who collectively hold approximately 20% of Orla, have entered into voting support agreements.

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter.

Gold M&A ramping up

The Equinox-Orla combination continues a run of major gold sector consolidation.

Last week, Western Australian producers Regis Resources (ASX: RRL) and Vault Minerals (ASX: VAU) announced a nil-premium merger to create a A$10.7 billion, 700,000ozpa producer.

Two weeks earlier, Agnico Eagle Mines (TSX: AEM) announced three transactions worth nearly US$2.8 billion which will consolidate its position in Finland’s Central Lapland Greenstone Belt.

The company is acquiring Rupert Resources (TSX: RUP) for C$2.9 billion and Aurion Resources (TSXV: AU) for C$481 million, as well as B2Gold’s (TSX: BTO) 70% interest in the Fingold JV for US$325 million in cash.

Earlier in April, G Mining Ventures Corp (TSX: GMIN) announced the C$3 billion acquisition of G2 Goldfields Inc (TSX: GTWO), combining the Oko West and Oko-Ghanie gold projects in Guyana.

According to Canaccord Genuity, there had been US$13.7 billion in gold deals announced up until April 21, when Agnico’s Finnish transactions were announced.

That was more than double the pace of last year, when a record US$28.4 billion in precious metals deals were announced for the year.

“We expect to see more consolidation in the sector in 2026, with companies flush with cash and cashflow,” analyst Carey MacRury said.

Barrick Mining Corporation (NYSE: B) CEO Mark Hill says the company will look to focus on lower-risk jurisdictions, echoing recent comments made by executive chairman John Thornton.

In a March 27 letter to shareholders, Thornton said “we will reduce our exposure to today’s higher-risk jurisdictions, enhance the value of our remaining assets through disciplined investment and strategic initiatives, and strengthen the whole with targeted acquisitions”.

Speaking after the release of Barrick’s Q1 results on Monday, Hill said the company would try to focus its growth on more stable regions.

“Where we have more certainty around the mining regime and the ability to operate without a lot of interference,” he said.

“So, without going through the actual list of the countries, obviously you can see with what’s happened in Africa recently, which countries would obviously not be ideal for investment.”

Hill suggested Barrick would look to divest its stake in the Porgera mine in Papua New Guinea, a joint venture with Zijin Gold International Company (HK: 2259) and the PNG government.

“We have a minority stake in it at 24% and we obviously spend a considerable amount of management time on it, so something like that would be considered non-core at this stage,” he said.

“From where we are now, that would be where I end it.”

The troubled Reko Diq project in Pakistan remains under review and Thorton was in Islamabad on Sunday meeting with government officials.

Hill said the company was spending US$20 million a month on Reko Diq.

“Right now, we’re having issues with the contractors on site, and we’ve had several force majeure notices, so the first thing is we have to understand the contracting strategy and how we’re going to make this successful,” he said.

“Obviously, the other thing is, I just want to re-run the capital and see where we are with that, and if there’s been any large shifts in the capital, and once we get the answer to all that, I can make an informed decision.

“I know I’ve been criticised for being overly cautious, but I think on a project like this, it’s important for all the shareholders, including the ones in Pakistan, that we actually understand where we are so we can be successful going forward.”

Priorities progressing

Hill said the four priorities Barrick set out at the start of this year were advancing.

“The first is obviously safety. Our safety performance has not been where it needs to be, and we’re taking action to improve it,” he said.

Hill said Barrick had historically focused on total reportable injuries.

“The company led the industry on that one metric, yet it did not adequately address the risks that can lead to serious injuries and fatalities,” he said.

“In Q4 of last year, we shifted our focus to identifying and eliminating the risks behind serious and fatal events.

“In Q1 we saw this change begin to work. There was a meaningful reduction in significant and higher severity injuries and 63% of all injuries during the quarter were classified as minor reported lost time. Injuries also declined.”

Barrick’s other three priorities are operational delivery, growth and the IPO of its North American assets.

On the IPO, Barrick said it remained on track to be complete by the end of the year.

The company remains in “constructive dialogue” with JV partner Newmont Corporation (NYSE: NEM) over the performance of Nevada Gold Mines.

Hill said the improvements at NGM had come quicker than he was expecting.

He added the relationship with Newmont had “completely changed” and he was onsite at NGM with Newmont CEO Natascha Viljoen last week.

“We are on track to execute successfully against all these four priorities by year-end,” Hill said.

“Barrick, historically, has been criticised for not delivering on its commitments, so I just want to highlight that this is the second quarter that we have delivered on all of our commitments to our shareholders.”

Production beat

Gold production for the first three months of 2026 was 719,000 ounces of gold, ahead of guidance of 640,000-680,000oz, driven by strong performances at NGM and Veladero, and the ramp-up at Loulo-Gounkoto.

Gold production in the current quarter is expected to rise to 730,000-770,000oz.

Copper production of 49,000 tonnes was in line with plan.

All-in sustaining costs were US$1708 an ounce of gold, better than plan.

Hill said every US$10 per barrel move in the price of diesel would impact AISC by US$12/oz.

Operating cashflow doubled year-on-year to US$2.55 billion, attributable operating cashflow was up 89% to US$1.97 billion, and attributable free cashflow was up 195% to US$1.21 billion.

Net earnings jumped 238% to US$1.6 billion, or US96c per share, while adjusted net earnings were up 173% to US$1.65 billion, or US98c per share.

The company declared a US17.5c per share dividend.

Barrick also announced a US$3 billion share buy-back program.

“Since 2021, Barrick has returned US$7.9 billion to shareholders, including US$697 million in Q1 2026, and US$2.4 billion in 2025,” Barrick chief financial officer Helen Cai said.

“Our capital allocation framework is disciplined, flexible and designed to work throughout the cycle.

“It supports reinvestment in the business, advances growth, protects the balance sheet and creates a clear pathway for returning excess cash to shareholders.”

Regis Resources (ASX: RRL) and Vault Minerals (ASX: VAU) have agreed to a merger of equals to create a A$10.7 billion Western Australia-focused gold producer.

Regis is a 365,000 ounce per annum producer via its Duketon operations and 30% stake in AngloGold Ashanti’s (NYSE: AU) Tropicana gold mine.

Vault is a 346,000ozpa producer from its Leonora, Mount Monger and Deflector operations.

As well as the WA assets, Regis holds the McPhillamys gold development in New South Wales, which has been stalled by permitting issues, while Vault owns the Sugar Zone project in Ontario, Canada.

The combined company will have 6 million ounces of reserves and 20.5Moz of resources and own 22.3 million tonnes per annum of milling capacity across nine plants, increasing to around 24.3Mtpa following the completion of the mill expansion at King of the Hills by the end of this year.

The merged company will become the third-largest primary ASX-listed gold producer behind Northern Star Resources (ASX: NST) and Evolution Mining (ASX: EVN).

Regis will acquire Vault via a scheme of arrangement with Vault shareholders to receive 0.6947 of a new Regis share for each Vault share held.

Regis shareholders will own roughly 51% of the company with Vault shareholders owning the remainder.

“The combined business becomes a globally relevant gold company of greater scale, with a high-quality portfolio of assets, exceptional cash generation capacity and the financial strength to create long-term value for shareholders,” Regis managing director Jim Beyer said on a conference call.

“There’s much more to it than just increasing in size. Our expanded portfolio of five producing assets plus two near-term growth options gives us genuine diversification and flexibility.

“It’s the type of portfolio, in terms of the number and type of assets, which we’ve been looking at for some time now.”

‘Significant’ cash generation

The enlarged company will be debt-free with A$1.9 billion in pro forma cash and bullion and available debt facilities of A$300 million.

Vault recently reached a cashflow inflection point with the close-out of its hedge book.

Regis and Vault forecast combined annualised free cashflow of A$1.7 billion.

“This level of cash generation is significantly higher than most of our peers and will enable the funding of growth initiatives, without the reliance on external capital, while also maintaining an attractive capital return policy for our shareholders,” Beyer said.

The merger is expected to realise over A$500 million of corporate tax benefits and lower the cost of capital for the combined company.

The companies see the scope to unlock cost efficiencies, via procurement savings and the reduction of corporate costs.

Beyer said the company would also look at applying Vault’s owner-operator model to the Regis assets.

Beyer added that good people were the core of a company.

“With the difficulty and challenges in the market now with the availability of good quality people, it would be crazy to think that there would be any sense in doing anything that would mean we’ve lost that skill and that capability,” he said.

“That’s one of the great strengths of this. We’re putting together two teams and creating, I think, what’ll be a bit of a powerhouse of technical and operating skills that I’m not sure will exist [elsewhere].”

Beyer will lead the enlarged company with Regis’ Anthony Rechichi and Michael Holmes to continue as chief financial officer and chief operating officer, respectively.

Vault managing director Luke Tonkin had previously announced his retirement.

Vault chair Russell Clark will become chair, with long-time Regis chair James Mactier to retire.

The combined company’s board will be comprised of four directors from each of the current Regis and Vault boards.

The deal will require approval from Vault shareholders and is expected to close by August or September.

Shares in small-cap developer Q-Gold Resources (TSXV: QGR) have doubled in the past month after the company revealed the economics for its Quartz Mountain gold project in Oregon.

The preliminary economic assessment for the project was released on April 8 and Q-Gold vice president corporate development Scott Moore said attendance at the Mining Forum Europe in Zürich the following week really marked the launch of the company.

Q-Gold completed the acquisition of Quartz Mountain from Alamos Gold (TSX/NYSE: AGI) late last year for US$2.85 million in cash and 13.9 million shares, as well as future milestone payments.

Alamos owns 9% of the company and its vice president, exploration Scott Parsons sits on the Q-Gold board.

Alamos had acquired the project in 2012 but had not done any work on it since 2016.

Once an asset under development by Robert Friedland, Quartz Mountain has been around for at least 45 years, but Q-Gold’s PEA marked the first study ever completed.

“No one’s ever done one before, and the numbers are fantastic,” Moore said in an interview.

Initial capital costs for a 14-year operation were forecast at US$290 million, including US$48 million in contingency.

Average production was forecast at 135,000 ounces per annum at all-in sustaining costs of US$1216 an ounce, with peak annual production of 166,300oz.

At a conservative gold price of US$3265/oz, the project has a post-tax net present value (5% discount rate) of US$1.71 billion, an internal rate of return of 55.2% and a payback period of 1.8 years.

At a gold price of US$4820/oz, the NPV increases to US$3.2 billion and the IRR increases to 92%.

“A very robust project on any metric,” Moore said.

The study was based on the project’s indicated resource of 2.01 million ounces of gold at 0.78 grams per tonne gold and inferred resource of 494,000oz at 0.8g/t gold.

The PEA contemplated a phased development with an initial open pit, heap leach operation, followed by the transition to a crushing and milling circuit, followed by flotation to produce a gold concentrate from around year five.

“The strip ratio is 0.6 to one, so one of the lowest in the world,” Moore said.

“We get about 80% recoveries back in the heap leach, so a good, robust project on that basis, and then 80%-plus in the sulphides, and we’ll do some more met test work to see if we can improve the sulphide recoveries.”

Q-Gold recently got approval from the United States Forest Service for an exploration program at the larger Angel’s Camp property, which adjoins Quartz Mountain to the east.

High-grade gold veins have previously been discovered at the 2660 acre property and Q-Gold will kick off a soil sampling program next month to define drill targets.

The company is planning more drilling this year at Quartz Mountain to increase the confidence of the resource and will plans to start a feasibility study around September.

Permitting improving

“You have to have an engineering study to kick off the permitting, so we are now full blown into the permitting process, both on the state and the federal level,” Moore said.

While permitting in Oregon has typically been slow, Q-Gold has been encouraged by the recent progress of Paramount Gold Nevada’s (NYSE American: PZG) Grassy Mountain project in the state.

Grassy Mountain was accepted into the US government’s FAST-41 program.

“They entered that last spring, and nine months later, they got the permits,” Moore said.

Quartz Mountain is east of the Cascade Mountains, an area in which the Oregon government is keen to stimulate economic activity.

“You’ve got a bit of a confluence of state and federal coming through to accelerate permits for important projects,” Moore said.

Q-Gold is planning to apply for the FAST-41 program and is hopeful of receiving permits within 24 months.

In the meantime, the company will be busy marketing.

The stock has risen from C14c before the PEA release to as high as C35c and remains at C28c.

With a market capitalisation of C$46 million, Moore believes Q-Gold is still undervalued, particularly when compared to companies with similar-sized projects in the US.

The stock has strong backing with institutional investors accounting for 52%, including Libra Investments (13%), Franklin Gold Fund (9%), ASA Gold Fund (9%) and Brasil Warrant (6%).

Agnico Eagle Mines (TSX/NYSE: AEM) has reported record operating margins and adjusted net income for the first quarter.

Agnico Eagle reported quarterly net income of US$1.7 billion, or US$3.39 per share, and record adjusted net income of US$1.70 billion, or US$3.41 per share.

The company generated cash provided by operating activities of US$1.34 billion, or $2.69 per share, and free cashflow of US$732 million, or US$1.46 per share, which included the impact of a US$1.3 billion payment for the remaining cash tax liability related to the 2025 taxation year.

Agnico reported first quarter payable gold production of 825,109 ounces, slightly above plan, at cash costs of US$1158 an ounce and all-in sustaining costs of US$1483/oz.

“We’re off to a good start to the year with solid operating performance, delivering record operational and financial results, record mill throughput at Macassa, record development rate at Meliadine, record pit tonnage at Detour,” Agnico Eagle CEO Ammar Al-Joundi said on a conference call.

“We’re delivering these solid operating results while doing an excellent job controlling costs, leveraging off our relentless focus on cost control while benefiting from certain structural cost advantages that derive from our business model.”

Agnico maintained 2026 guidance at 3.3-3.5 million ounces of gold, 52% weighted to the second half.

Guidance for cash costs and AISC remained unchanged at US$1020-1120/oz and US$1400-1550/oz, respectively.

“This is no small task, given the uncertainties and pressures in the market over the past several weeks,” Al-Joundi said.

The company said its focus on local procurement and resilient supply chains should insulate it from disruption to fuel and consumables supply.

Its cost guidance is based on an assumed diesel benchmark price of US78c per litre (excluding transportation and taxes), though 54% of its 2026 diesel exposure is hedged at US71c/L.

Diesel represents around 10% of Agnico’s operating costs and the company estimates a 10% change in diesel prices would impact total cash costs by roughly US$4/oz on a net basis after hedges, or around US$8/oz excluding the impact of diesel hedges.

Agnico Eagle’s cash balance increased by US$246 million to US$3.1 billion, resulting in a March 31 net cash position of US$2.9 billion.

“We distributed US$375 million to shareholders. We invested almost US$400 million into our high-quality growth projects, all while increasing our cash position by almost US$250 million,” Al-Joundi said.

“At these gold prices, we will increase our share repurchases, and we are increasing our normal course issuer bid to US$2 billion.”

Two weeks ago, Agnico Eagle announced the acquisitions of Rupert Resources (TSX: RUP) and Aurion Resources (TSXV: AU) and the acquisition of B2Gold’s (TSX: BTO) 70% interest in Fingold Ventures to consolidate its landholding in Finland.

The company plans to evaluate opportunities to reduce dilution associated with the Rupert transaction, including potentially returning the proceeds of portfolio investment sales to shareholders through share repurchases.

Unrivalled growth

“Perhaps the most important takeaway – we continue to aggressively reinvest in our business, into the best pipeline in the industry, into projects that deliver exceptional returns at relatively lower risk,” Al-Joundi said.

It’s part of a plan to increase gold output by 20-30% over the next decade, which includes increasing production at Detour and Canadian Malartic, already Canada’s largest gold mines, to 1Moz each per year.

Agnico Eagle will also make a final investment decision on the Hope Bay project in Nunavut this month, with the mine expected to contribute 400,000oz per annum by 2030.

“In addition, with the expected consolidation of our Finnish platform, we now see a path to further growth that comes from building a 500,000 ounce a year, multi-decade platform in what we believe to be the most prospective land package in Northern Europe,” Al-Joundi said.

“We will focus on the best mining jurisdictions based on geologic potential and political stability.

“We’ll be disciplined with our owners’ money, making investment decisions based on technical and regional knowledge, creating value through the drill bit and through smart acquisitions, where and when it makes sense.”

The company was again asked about its future in Australia and Mexico.

Al-Joundi said he visited the company’s Fosterville operation in Victoria, Australia about a month ago.

“We spent a lot of time on some recent, I would say, very good exploration results in and around Fosterville,” he said.

“That part of Australia was the original gold rush, and nobody’s really focused on it for decades, and it’s still very early, but I was quite pleasantly surprised with some of the results they were getting and the enthusiasm they had.

“We get questions all the time about the rest of Australia. We think Australia is a great place to mine, not just for gold, but you know us – we are very careful about what we do.

“We’re very disciplined, and right now we continue to be focused in Australia, at Fosterville, and the team we have there and the opportunities around that.”

On Mexico, Al-Joundi said he wouldn’t rule out consolidating the San Nicolás copper project if its 50% partner, Teck Resources (TSX: TECK), wanted to sell.

“We are looking at opportunities to expand San Nicolás but, beyond that, there’s really nothing substantial that we’re seeing as an opportunity in Mexico,” he said.

Deutsche Bank Research Institute says the world has returned to a battle of the superpowers, which has major implications for the US dollar and gold.

“In 1989, Francis Fukuyama argued that humanity had reached ‘the end of history’,” DB strategist Mallika Sachdeva and research analyst Michael Hsueh wrote in a report released this week.

“In the years that followed, the US became the uncontested hegemon, global trade exploded in a US-defined liberal order, developed market central banks sold gold, while emerging markets accumulated vast amounts of US dollar FX reserves.”

The report argues that the ‘end of history’ has come to an end.

“The world is back in a superpower struggle; the US is retreating from free trade, alliances, and security provision; the Great Economic Moderation is behind us; and the dollar banking system has been weaponised,” it said.

“The ‘return of history’ has big implications for gold and the dollar. “

Central bank reserves

DB’s report argues that the share of gold in central bank reserves is not driven by the global monetary system, but rather, by the global geopolitical environment.

“Gold’s decline as a share of reserves did not happen with the fall of Bretton Woods in the 1970s, but the fall of the Berlin Wall and the assertion of US hegemony in the 1990s,” DB said.

“As tectonic geopolitical plates shift again, the share of US dollars in central bank reserves is once more in decline.”

The share of US dollars in global central bank reserves has dropped sharply from its peak of around 60% at the turn of the century to 40% today,

“Importantly, the dollar’s losses as a share of central bank reserves have not gone to other fiat currencies, but to gold,” Sachdeva and Hsueh said.

At the same time, gold’s share in global central bank reserves has doubled in the past four years alone to nearly 30%.

“The fact that the gap between the dollar and gold as a share of reserves is now just 10% is extremely notable,” analysts noted.

Until the 1990s, gold had made up a larger share of central bank reserves than the dollar.

Sachdeva and Hsueh said it was too easy to write off gold’s rising share of reserves as a result of price increases.

“Indeed, around 80% of the rise in gold’s share has been on account of prices,” they said.

“But there is a genuine volume driver underlying this: central bank purchases have arguably themselves been behind significant price momentum.

“There is indeed a close relationship between official purchases and sales of gold and the change in the real gold price. Volume and prices are thus endogenously related and are both doing the legwork of gold’s rising share.”

It’s all about emerging markets

DB said the changing dynamics were largely being driven by emerging markets (EM).

“EM central banks have been actively buying gold and driving upward pressure on prices; crucially, their FX reserves may also now begin to structurally decline,” the report said.

“A ‘return of history’ would be consistent with gold getting to at least a 40% share of global reserves.”

As of the end of 2025, EM central banks held 16% of reserves in gold, with China holding just 9% of its reserves in gold.

DB argued there was significant scope for EM to grow their share.

“We find that EM countries with closer non-Western defence ties hold more gold,” it said.

“If the world diversifies trade and security dependence away from the US, this would be consistent with less USD and more gold in reserves.”

EM central banks have purchased more than 225 million ounces of gold over the past 17 years, which is more than advanced economy central banks sold in the 1990s.

EM central banks still only hold half the amount of physical gold of developed markets (DM), with 367Moz at the end of 2025, versus 712Moz held by advanced economies.

“The ratio of EM/DM central bank gold holding is at around 52%, having risen from just 20% before the 2008 GFC,” DB said.

DM central banks held 34% of reserves in gold as of the end of last year,

“There thus remains a significant gap to close, if not ultimately exceed,” DB said.

The latest World Gold Council figures, released on Wednesday, support DB’s thesis.

Central banks purchased an estimated 244 tonnes of gold in the first quarter, with demand exceeding the previous quarter and the five-year average.

The National Bank of Poland was once again the largest purchaser, increasing its gold reserves by 31t over the quarter to 582t, tracking closer to its 700t target.

The Central Bank of Uzbekistan added 25t to its gold reserves during the quarter, taking its gold holdings to 416t, or 87% of the bank’s total reserves.

The People’s Bank of China increased its gold reserves by 7t in Q1, more than doubling its net purchase in the previous quarter, while other buyers included the National Bank of Kazakhstan (12t), Czech National Bank (5t), Bank Negara Malaysia (5t), Bank of Guatemala (2t), National Bank of Cambodia (2t), Bank Indonesia (2t), National Bank of Serbia (1t) and the Central Bank of the UAE (1t).

What does this mean for gold prices?

DB simulated a range of different outcomes for gold prices depending on the level of FX reserves EM central banks end up with, and the share of gold in reserves they target.

It considered a steady state for EM FX reserves of US$8 trillion, as well as a drastic decline to US$2.5 trillion, a more modest decline to US$5 trillion and an increase to US$10 trillion, while for the share of gold in reserves, it looked at a range of different shares rising from 15% to 40%.

It noted that every 1Moz of gold purchases or sales drove a 1% increase or decrease, respectively, in gold prices.

Stable EM FX reserves and a 20% share of gold in reserves, close to today’s levels, results in a gold price of US$5300 an ounce.

Stable EM FX reserves and a 40% share of gold in reserves equated to a gold price of US$11,600/oz, while rises in EM FX reserves and a 40% share of gold in reserves resulted in a gold price of US$14,000/oz.

“As intuition would suggest, if EM central banks are targeting a rising share of gold in a steady or growing FX reserves environment, this would be the most bullish outcome for gold,” Sachdeva and Hsueh said.

“But even in an environment where EM FX reserves decline to US$5 trillion, if central banks target an increase of gold’s share to 40%, this could still be consistent with gold prices rising to near US$8000 over the next five years.”

The silver market was in deficit in 2025 for the fifth consecutive year, a situation that is not projected to reverse any time soon.

The World Silver Survey, which was prepared for the Silver Institute by Metals Focus, was released earlier this month.

Total silver demand fell by 2% in 2025 to 1.13 billion ounces with a 14% jump in coin and bar demand almost offsetting a 3% slide in industrial demand, an 8% drop in jewellery fabrication and a 21% slump in silverware demand.

Total supply last year was 1.09Boz, with global silver mine production rising by 3% to 846.6 million ounces.

The gains came from higher by-product output from copper operations in Peru, the ramp-up of Polymetal JSC’s Prognoz mine in Russia and smaller gains were from Chinese and Moroccan operations, which were partly offset by lower output from operations in Mexico and a decline in Indonesia.

North American output fell by 3% to a 10-year low, while Central and South American production rose by 5%.

Recycling rose by 2% to a 12-year high of 197.6Moz.

Silver demand in 2026 is forecast to fall by 2% to 1.11Moz, with a further rise in coin and bar demand to be offset by falls in jewellery, silverware and industrial demand.

Mine production is expected to remain flat this year.

As a result, the structural market deficit is projected to widen to 46.3Moz in 2026, which translates into a cumulative stock drawdown of 765Moz since 2021.

“This, along with renewed ETP demand and ongoing US tariff uncertainty, leaves the market vulnerable to another liquidity squeeze,” Metals Focus said.

“In turn, this suggests that heightened volatility and further price gains appear likely in 2026.”

While the Iran War complicated the short-term outlook, the report concluded that the broader macroeconomic and geopolitical backdrop remained supportive for silver prices

Producers bullish

Silver prices reached record highs of more than US$120 an ounce in January but are sitting at around US$75/oz today.

While prices have been volatile, silver producers attending this month’s Mining Forum Europe in Zürich were optimistic about the demand outlook.

“Silver is a very complex story, much more complex than gold, because silver has two uses,” Pan American Silver Corp (NYSE: PAAS) president and CEO Michael Steinmann told the event.

“The use right now on the industrial side is growing so fast that we are already at about 65% of the world’s silver production that is used up, and you can imagine with further electrification – not only with clean energy production – but self-driving cars, data centres, AI, the use of silver is increasing very, very fast.”

The silver market is expected to remain in deficit until at least 2030.

“We know there’s no significant silver coming online, and that deficit is going to prevail for quite some time,” First Majestic Silver Corp (NYSE/TSX: AG) president and chief corporate development officer Mani Alkhafaji said during the forum.

“There are new industries that are coming in the market that’s not being talked about.

“We just came from a recent conference and there’s discussion about the AI data centres. On average, a data centre consumes 6.6 tonnes of silver and that’s a significant number that’s not being replaced by any new supply hitting the market.”

New supply

Steinmann pointed to the difficulty in bringing on new silver supply.

“75% of the production comes as a byproduct from copper production, and copper is already at an all-time high, nearly, and there’s not many big copper mines coming on in the next few years, so hence not much more silver production,” he said.

Steinmann said Pan American’s La Colorada Skarn project in Mexico and the potential restart of the Escobal mine in Guatemala was the only meaningful future additions to production.

A March revised preliminary economic assessment for the La Colorada skarn expansion returned capital costs of US$1.9 billion for a 37-year operation producing 15.8Moz of silver and 239,000t of zinc per year in the first five years, in addition to the 3.3Moz of silver and 6000t of zinc per year produced by the La Colorada vein mine.

Discovery Silver Corp (TSX: DSV) owns the world’s largest undeveloped silver deposit, Cordero in Mexico, which has been stalled by permitting delays.

Discovery senior vice president, investor relations Mark Utting said the company was encouraged by Silver Tiger Metals Inc (TSXV: SLVR) recently receiving a permit for its El Tigre silver development in Mexico.

“We know that the project was reviewed with the president in late January as one of several key projects for the country. We understand it was basically green-lighted at the executive level,” he said.

“It is our understanding, basically, we’re looking at a government administration exercise, so when we say that we are confident we’re going to be permitted very soon, that is the basis of that optimism.”

Discovery will then spend around six months updating the economics for the 14Moz per year project and could start construction by late 2026.

These days, 70% of Coeur Mining’s (NYSE: CDE) revenue comes from gold, but the company is advancing the Silvertip polymetallic project in British Columbia.

Coeur SVP and chief financial officer Tom Whelan said the company had just completed a PEA, which would be presented to the board in May ahead of a decision on whether to move to a prefeasibility study.

“I don’t want to get ahead of the board, but obviously with this higher silver price environment, all of the work that we’ve done, we’re starting to get pretty excited,” he said.

“Just to give you a sense of the order of magnitude of what that could look like, Silvertip’s an 11 million tonne resource at 300 grams silver. If you take 2000-3000t a day, that’s 6-8 million more ounces of silver.”

Also a gold-silver producer, Kingsgate Consolidated (ASX: KCN) is dusting off plans for its 61Moz Nueva Esperanza silver development in Chile.

“It is easily one of the largest underdeveloped silver projects in South America, I think, in fact, probably globally,” Kingsgate managing director Jamie Gibson said.

“I think if you look at the size of the resource, it’s probably in the world’s top 10.

“In fact, Kinross had this in the late ‘90s and it was the largest silver mine in the world. I think those guys got something like 35-40 million ounces out of it in about 13 months, so we know it’s got scale.”

Kingsgate has appointed new consultants and will update the 2016 PFS.

Hecla Mining (NYSE: HL) is already the largest silver producer in the US and Canada and will look at the restart of Midas in Nevada in the medium-term.

“The story is we’ve got a nearly fully permitted 1200 tons per day mill, tailings infrastructure, surface facilities, utilities in place, and our 2025 exploration program was pretty exciting. It identified a couple of new structures, new veins, both very high-grade,” Hecla CEO Rob Krcmarov said.

“The path from here is really aggressive exploration 2026. If that continues to pan out, resource definition and technical studies in the next year or two, then a go decision and production perhaps 3-4 years beyond that, so realistically, potentially an operating mine in, let’s call it the next five years or so.”

Other growth

Juniors presenting in Zürich also outlined silver growth plans.

Aya Gold & Silver (TSX: AYA) is growing silver production at Zgounder in Morocco from 5Moz last year to nearly 7Moz this year and is aiming to reach 43Moz of silver equivalent by 2029 via the development of its second mine, Boumadine.

Americas Gold & Silver Corp (TSX: USA) has flagged a 30% increase in silver production in Nevada this year from 2.65Moz to 3.2-3.6Moz.

Avino Silver & Gold Mines (NYSE American: ASM) president and CEO David Wolfin spoke of the company’s plans to go from one producing mine in Mexico to three operations by 2028, with production to rise from around 2.5Moz per year to 8-10Moz.

Kuya Silver Corp (CSE: KUYA) is planning to increase production from Bethania in Peru this year to 1.5Moz and double production by 2028.

Newmont Corporation (NYSE: NEM) announced another record quarter of free cashflow generation and doubled the size of its share repurchase program.

Gold production in the first quarter dropped 10% to 1.3 million ounces, while copper production was up 3% to 30,000 tonnes and silver production increased 29% to 9Moz.

Gold by-product all-in sustaining costs fell by 21% to US$1029 an ounce due to lower sustaining capital spend, G&A, and other expenses, while the average realised gold price for the quarter increased by US$684 to US$4900/oz.

Net income for the quarter was up US$2 billion to US$3.3 billion, while adjusted net income rose by US$400 million to US$3.2 billion.

The company generated US$3.8 billion of cash from operating activities, net of working capital impacts of US$202 million, and reported record free cashflow of US$3.1 billion, up 12%.

Newmont CEO Natascha Viljoen said the result was particularly notable given the seasonal working capital headwinds typically experienced in the first quarter of each year.

Australia challenges

Gold production in Q1 fell due to a bushfire at Boddington in Western Australia, heavy rainfall and a fatal accident at Tanami in the Northern Territory and heavy snowfall at Brucejack in British Columbia.

Newmont maintained 2026 production guidance of 5.3Moz of gold, 52% weighted to the second half.

Newmont expects to produce 23% of total 2026 attributable production in the second quarter of 2026, slightly below first quarter production.

On April 14, a magnitude 4.5Mla earthquake was recorded in New South Wales near Newmont’s Cadia operation.

There were no injuries but some damage to underground infrastructure and operations were briefly suspended.

Cadia is currently processing surface stockpiles and expects underground rehabilitation to be completed in the next five weeks, enabling a return to 80% operating capacity, with full operational capacity expected by the end of the current quarter.

Despite lower AISC in the first quarter, Newmont maintained full-year guidance of US$1650/oz.

Unit costs are expected to be notably higher than the first quarter due to higher sustaining capital spend, lower silver production, and higher costs at Boddington, Tanami, Lihir and Peñasquito.

The company warned unit costs could be impacted by higher oil prices, while increased royalties in Ghana were expected to result in a US$25/oz impact.

“Over the last few weeks, the world has experienced a notable increase in energy prices and impacts to global supply chain dynamics as a result of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East,” Viljoen said.

“We continue to monitor the geopolitical environment and its potential impact on cost closely but remain encouraged by our demonstrated ability to effectively manage costs and improve productivity, and are therefore maintaining our full-year cost guidance at this time.”

Returns boosted

Since the company’s last conference call in February, it returned US$2.7 billion to shareholders via dividends and share buy-backs.

It declared a first quarter dividend of US26c per share.

The Newmont board has authorised an additional US$6 billion of share repurchases.

Newmont ended the quarter with US$8.8 billion of cash and US$12.8 billion in total liquidity, with a net cash position of US$3.2 billion.

The company has a minimum cash balance target of US$5 billion and a net cash target of US$1 billion.

Sustaining capital guidance for 2026 is US$1.95 billion, while development capital spend is expected to be US$1.4 billion.

In light of Agnico Eagle Mines’ (TSX: AEM) deals announced earlier this week, Viljoen was asked about Newmont’s appetite for M&A.

“Just from a disciplined capital allocation point of view, our focus remains firmly, firstly, on continuing to drive our own operations, to be the best operators of these operations, and to get them to operate in the way that they should,” she said.

“Then we have a number of brownfields opportunities that we believe would be very value-accretive for us, and then, of course, by the time we get to greenfields projects and any what could-be acquisition opportunities, it will have to compete for capital within the broader portfolio.

“So, our focus at this stage reminds firmly internally on our operations.”

Nevada Gold Mines

In February, Newmont revealed it had sent a notice of default to its Nevada Gold Mines partner Barrick Mining Corporation (NYSE: B) under the NGM joint venture agreement.

It came after Barrick announced a proposed initial public offering of its North American assets.

Newmont has a 38.5% interest in Nevada Gold Mines (NGM) in the US and a 40% interest in Pueblo Viejo in the Dominican Republic, both operated by Barrick.

At the time, Newmont expressed concern about the operation and management of NGM due to “a degradation in performance and subsequent asset value over the past six years”.

Viljoen said discussions were ongoing, while Newmont was also collecting information on Barrick’s 100%-owned Fourmile discovery.

“We continue to engage constructively with our Nevada Gold Mines joint venture partner with a clear focus on improving the performance of our shared assets and delivering long-term value for Newmont shareholders,” Viljoen said.

“Our focus remains, firstly, on improving the Nevada Gold Mines joint venture performance, and then we are continuously working with our joint venture partner to gain more information around Fourmile and the work that we need to do there.”

Newmont interim chief financial officer Peter Wexler said the notice of default was open-ended.

“There’s no set timeline for bringing it to resolution, but we hope to do so in the near term and make sure that Nevada Gold Mines is operating at the highest level possible,” he said.

Hycroft Mining Holding Corporation (Nasdaq: HYMC) president and CEO Diane Garrett believes recent high-grade discoveries made by the company has the potential to transform the future of its namesake project in Nevada.

The large, low-grade Hycroft project was discovered in the 1980s and has a chequered history of on-and-off heap leach production over the past 40 years.

Acquired out of bankruptcy by Hycroft in 2015, the project most recently produced at a small scale between 2019 and 2022.

“This is not the Hycroft that you used to know,” Garrett declared at last week’s Mining Forum Europe in Zürich.

“We have come into what’s always been known as a world-class asset, but low-grade, and we have turned it into something extremely amazing.”

Hycroft’s recent focus has been exploration.

“We were drawn to this company because we recognised there was an opportunity to find out what was feeding this massive resource, and by doing two years of meticulous technical work we have discovered not one, but two, very, very high-grade silver systems,” Garrett said.

“We’re now finding high-grade gold, and the story is just beginning and evolving.”

Brimstone and Vortex

Despite its long history and large resource, Hycroft estimates less than 10% of the project area of 64,000 acres has been explored.

The high-grade Brimstone deposit was discovered in late 2023.

“So, when we talk about high-grade, what do we mean? Well, our discovery hole, the best hole ever drilled in the 40-year history of Hycroft, was 85m of over 500 grams of silver,” Garrett said.

“Then we drilled the best hole ever again, and that was 21m of 2800g of silver.

“That was really spectacular and, in that hole, we had 80,000g intercepts, multi-thousand-gram intercepts, not just over small intervals, but 20, 30, 40, 50m intervals.

“This is staggering for us and for this orebody.”

Earlier this month, Hycroft reported a hit of 3.4m at 304.14g/t silver and 1.33g/t gold, including 7m at 1241.97g/t silver and 6.59g/t gold and a “phenomenal” 0.9m at 2890g/t silver and 33.7g/t gold at Vortex.

“We have never seen that anywhere at Hycroft, so we’re real excited about that,” Garrett said.

In February, Hycroft updated the resource for the project by 55% to 16.4 million ounces of gold and 562.6Moz of silver at 0.33g/t gold and 11.42g/t silver in the measured and indicated categories, as well as 5.03Moz of gold and 132.8Moz at 0.3g/t gold and 7.9g/t silver in the inferred category.

The company also reported an initial high-grade measured and indicated resource of 90.2Moz of silver at 154.7g/t silver for Brimstone and Vortex, as well as 13.3Moz at 125.18g/t silver in the inferred category.

There are still results from the two new discoveries which are yet to be included in the resource.

The company is working on step-out drilling with two rigs on site and another two on the way.

“We’re drilling three times the size of the program we did in our discovery year, so over 20,000m,” Garrett said.

“That’s an indication to you that we think these systems are going to become much larger. They’re still open in all directions and at depth.

“Our focus right now is on these two high-grade systems, but we’ve taken what we’ve learned at Brimstone and Vortex and we’re applying it to other areas and we’re seeing some very interesting things.

“Now we understand what is feeding this massive, low-grade resource and we think that we’re going to see much more potential on the high-grade throughout the district.”

Development plans

Hycroft has a preliminary economic assessment due imminently though it was started prior to the discovery of Brimstone and Vortex.

Garrett said the focus would be on a small, high-grade operation sized at around 3500-5000 tonnes per day.

The company will also assess a restart of the heap leach due to higher precious metal prices.

“We do believe it’s economic, so we’re looking at that as a potential revenue source as we bridge our way to the sulphide milling, and our motto is drill, baby, drill,” Garrett said.

This week, Hycroft appointed engineering consultancy RESPEC Company to review underground mining options at Brimstone and Vortex.

In parallel, the company is evaluating the development of an exploration decline to enable underground drill access.

“Brimstone starts within 30m of the bottom of the Brimstone pit, so very easy access,” Garrett said.

Hycroft already has permits for heap leaching and milling in place.

“We are different from most developers because we have a substantial amount of infrastructure on site,” Garrett said.

“We have a fully operational lab. We have truck shops, maintenance shops, warehouses, admin buildings. We have two processing facilities. We have a rail line that runs right through the property.

“We also have a brand new leach pad that is ready to receive ore because in about the first 20 years of the operation we’ll still be in and out of heap leach material in addition to milling material.”

Hycroft, which is 43% owned by Eric Sprott, has unrestricted cash of US$189 million and no debt.

The repayment of US$125.5 million of debt late last year, combined with exploration success and higher metal prices, saw Hycroft’s market capitalisation rise as high as US$4.5 billion.

The stock is up by more than 1000% over the past 12 months and Hycroft’s market cap now sits at US$3.6 billion.

“This is an evolving, developing story. It has been an amazing discovery,” Garrett said.

“Our share price has reflected that value, but we’ve only just scratched the surface and we have so much further to go.”

Royalties, production taxes, windfall levies, and “wealth sharing” arrangements are moving faster than the offtake models on most sell-side desks, and with +$4,000/oz gold, the arithmetic has stopped being marginal. When a fiscal regime changes from 3 percent to 5 percent, or from a flat production royalty to a sliding scale indexed to the metal price, the NPV of a long-life asset can move far more than a decent intercept report from a drill bit. That was the subtext of a surprising number of presentations this year, and if you listened for it across the full sixty-plus-company slate, it definitely coalesced into a theme worth investor attention.

You could reasonably call it a royalty ratchet, and the cleanest way to see it is to line up three producers, two continents apart, and read off the numbers they put on their own slides.

The math on one slide: IAMGOLD at Essakan

IAMGOLD [$11.21B, $19.25, USD] is a useful anchor because Maarten Theunissen, the CFO, walked through the royalty math on his own cost waterfall and did not try to hide it. The Canadian cash cow is Coté in Ontario; the growth project is Nelligan in Québec; but the free cash flow engine right now is Essakan in Burkina Faso, and Essakan’s cost structure includes a line item that did not exist in any meaningful form a decade ago.

“[Essakan’s] cost structure also includes a royalty that’s $400 an ounce. So if you look at the cost structure, although it is on the higher end of the scale, it does include that royalty.” — Maarten Theunissen, CFO, IAMGOLD

At $400 an ounce, it ceases to be a straightforward tax rate. For context, Theunissen noted in the same deck that Coté in Ontario also carries an embedded royalty, roughly $300 per ounce, which shows the Burkina regime is already 30-plus percent richer per ounce than the Ontario one, on a mine with approximately the same production size and higher overall risks.

Nevertheless, the reason that math works for IAMGOLD at all is that its cash leaves the country cleanly. By mid-February 2026, the company had already repatriated $170 million from Burkina to Canada for the year, and the share buyback program is being funded almost one-for-one out of that repatriated Burkina cash. Through the end of March, the company had purchased $260 million of shares since January. That is as clear a demonstration as you will get that a producer’s sovereign exposure is not necessarily a binary risk flag, but a working capital decision. It also means the company has built its entire 2026 capital return program on the assumption that the $400-per-ounce royalty does not move again.

Papua New Guinea’s “first of three” installment

The K92 Mining [$4.86B, $20.18 CAD] presentation contained one of the most quietly extraordinary sentences of the week. John Lewins, the CEO, was walking through the Kainantu operation in PNG, with seven million ounces of resources at nine grams per ton, stage three expansion commissioned on time, when he paused to address the government relationship.

“Earlier this year, in fact, just a couple of weeks back, we paid our first tax installment for 2026 to the government, which was 287 million kina… around about $70 million of US dollars, and that was our first of three installments for the year.” — John Lewins, CEO, K92 Mining

That’s $210 million of corporate tax for a single calendar year from a mine that is still ramping toward 300,000 ounces, from a company whose market capitalization is under $5 billion. Lewins also disclosed that across 2024 and 2025 combined, K92 had already paid “in excess of $100 million US dollars in corporate tax to the government” while spending $350 million on capex. The PNG prime minister, Lewins noted, personally issued a press release thanking the company for the size of the installment. He described the exchange this way:

“Which went some way to overcoming the sadness of giving away $70 million.” — Lewins

That line got a laugh in the room, but it is the most important number in the PNG investment case. A stage-three producer in a jurisdiction where one in every two dollars of gold exploration spending comes from a single company is no longer a low-tax story. It is a very-high-absolute-dollar tax story in which the take is tied directly to the gold price, and the ratcheting mechanism is not a new mining code, it is simply that at $4,000 gold, the pre-existing code prints a bigger number for the treasury.

“Out of control”: the West Africa diagnosis

If IAMGOLD and K92 give you the specific numbers, Aya Gold & Silver [$2.6B, $18.16 CAD] gave the clearest articulation of the pattern. Aya is a Moroccan story, but President and CEO Benoit La Salle started by telling the audience where he had come from, and the framing was the most direct piece of sovereign-risk commentary on the forum floor.

“I’ve lived through 1990, 2000, when gold went up and up and up and up. We were in Burkina, Guinea, Mali, you name it. We were everywhere, and you know what happened? Everywhere taxes went up, royalties went up, indirect costs went up, and demands went up. It was out of control. Right now, if you look at West Africa, it’s out of control. Its royalties are up to 12 percent, so jurisdiction in a fast-moving commodity price has got to be your number one criterion for looking at a project.” — Aya Gold & Silver presentation

“Jurisdiction in a fast-moving commodity price has got to be your number one criterion” is not a throwaway line from someone who has never operated in Africa. La Salle’s career was built on building mines in Burkina Faso, and he is explicitly telling an investment audience that what broke the last cycle for West African producers was not the gold price; it was the fiscal regime catching up to the gold price. Twelve percent royalties are three times what most Western majors build into a life-of-mine model, and the quiet implication is that the number may not be done moving.

Aya is making the bull case for a specific jurisdiction by making the bear case for an entire continent.

The real-time exhibit for La Salle's diagnosis landed while the Forum was still in progress. West African Resources, an ASX-listed producer that was not on the Mining Forum Europe roster but is a member of the Denver Gold Group operating next door to Aya's former stomping grounds, confirmed that the Burkina Faso government has moved to take a 40 percent stake in its flagship Kiaka gold mine, up from the 15 percent free-carried interest already embedded in the existing mining convention. A producer already running at the current West African fiscal terms is being asked, mid-ramp, to hand over another quarter of the equity. The ratchet is not a modeling abstraction, but reality, and is the kind of single-line event that can move an asset's NPV by more than any reasonable range of drill results.

Mexico: a cautionary tale

The most expensive lesson in how quickly the political/social license line can move is still being learned in real time at Los Filos, and Equinox Gold [$12.32B, $15.63 CAD] entered the Zürich session with its fireside chat essentially organized around it. Ryan King, EVP Capital Markets, was asked how Los Filos fits into the growth pipeline; his answer:

“Los Filos is currently on suspended operations. We’ve had it suspended for about 15 months now. What we’re doing is we’re working through land access agreements. We have land access agreements with two Ejido communities. We’re working on the third community.” — Ryan King, EVP Capital Markets, Equinox Gold

Los Filos is the fourth-largest gold deposit in the Americas with over sixteen million ounces across all categories. The original technical study was designed around $1,300 gold; the asset has been stranded without production for fifteen months at a gold price more than three times higher. The bottleneck is not permits in the conventional sense, and it is not the mineral reserves and resources. It is a community-by-community land access negotiation that effectively constitutes a parallel fiscal regime, priced by the Ejido rather than by a ministry, and the number on which an updated technical report lands will depend on how each of those negotiations breaks.

A few slots later in the schedule, Agnico Eagle [$110.27B, $220.10 USD] was asked to describe its own Mexico strategy. Dominic Girard, EVP Nunavut and Europe, answered without defensiveness:

“Mexico, we, we have one mine still in operation, Pinos Altos. There’s 2-3 years in front of us. The team is looking with the current gold price, could we expand it because again we have the thing built and we have the team. We’ll see if there’s something. But the thinking is, is to use the workforce and the knowledge, to help and to develop, Saint Nicolas.” — Dominic Girard, EVP Nunavut and Europe, Agnico Eagle

Pinos Altos winding down to a two-to-three-year tail while the same workforce pivots to Saint Nicolas (a Mexican zinc development project still in permitting) is not a rejection of the country, but it is not an endorsement either. The more telling line in the Agnico presentation was structural rather than country-specific: Girard said Agnico’s two gating criteria for any new region are geological potential and “political and social stability,” and drove the point home with this:

“Even though we could build many mines in Africa, we won’t, in Africa, we won’t go there.” — Girard

A firm with 85 percent of its production in Canada, making explicit that it will not chase grade into West Africa at almost $4,000 gold, is a critical data point. It is also a re-rating mechanism: the premium that accrues to Agnico’s Canadian ounces is being paid for by the discount that accrues to someone else’s Africa ounces, and the wider the royalty ratchet goes, the wider that spread gets.

Guatemala: the stranded twenty-million-ounce asset

Pan American Silver [$24.89B, $59.06 USD] has an even starker version of the same problem. Escobal in Guatemala produced 21 million ounces of silver when it was last operating and has been suspended for years, awaiting a government-led indigenous consultation process. Michael Steinmann, the CEO, has been asked about it at every forum I can remember, and his 2026 answer was the most forward I have heard him give:

“We are obviously very open to discuss any kind of participation on that project. Together with the indigenous group and the government… The mine is ready to go. We would need about $80 to $100 million working capital to start it up, about 6 months to bring it back into production.” — Michael Steinmann, CEO, Pan American Silver

The asset is fully built, could be in production in six months, and the capital requirement to restart is a rounding error against a company with over $2 billion of liquidity. The only missing piece is the fiscal and equity-sharing structure that gets agreed between the indigenous group and the Guatemalan government. When Steinmann uses the phrase “sharing wealth from that project” alongside “the government of Guatemala,” he signals that whatever emerges is unlikely to be a conventional royalty.

The useful question is not whether that deal eventually gets done. It probably does, because at these metal prices, everyone on every side of the negotiation gets paid enough to sign. The useful question is what cost structure the restarted mine carries when it does.

Morocco: the counter-example, in three numbers

Every story like this needs a control case, and Aya Gold & Silver is the single clearest example at the forum. The Morocco pitch, given the backdrop of the West Africa commentary above, was almost aggressively straightforward.

“They just came up with their new mining code. You’ll love that. Royalty 0. Free carried interest, 0. Taxation 32 percent. Permitting takes 2 weeks to 3 months on a PA. Once you’re permitted, you’re permitted for life. So you can’t beat that.” — Aya Gold & Silver presentation, President & CEO Benoit La Salle.

Zero royalty. Zero state free-carry. Thirty-two percent corporate tax. Permit turnaround is measured in weeks. That is the fiscal regime most West African countries had in 1995, and the comparison is not accidental; La Salle named Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali explicitly and said the Moroccan regime today is what those regimes were at the start of the last bull market. The counter-example goes further. For very large projects, he said, the corporate tax rate is negotiated below 32 percent: “That size of a project will have its own tax agreement, and we’re not gonna be at the 32 percent tax rate.” Aya is building the Boumadine project (a 37-million-ounce-silver-equivalent-a-year asset) for $446 million of capex, roughly one-third of what the same mine would cost in North America, and the government has offered, unprompted, to build the railway and power line to connect the mine to the port because the concentrate tonnage justifies it.

None of this is a prediction that Morocco will stay this way forever; the whole point of the observations is that fiscal regimes seem to be mean-reverting, and mean-reversion runs in one direction during bull markets. But for now, Morocco is the best-defined counterexample in the gold-silver space, and the spread between the Morocco fiscal curve and the Burkina Faso fiscal curve should arguably be the single largest input into the relative value of Aya versus any of the West African mid-cap producers. The market does not yet appear to discount it that way.

Lines to watch

If the fiscal regime ratchet really is a cycle feature rather than a headline, there are three specific places where the next leg of it will show up first, and I came out of the forum with a watchlist:

1. Price-indexed royalties

The IAMGOLD Essakan number is not primarily the result of a rule change, it is a sliding scale doing what sliding scales do at +$4,000 gold. Watch for other jurisdictions to migrate from flat NSR regimes to explicitly price-indexed scales, and for existing indexed scales to get their upper brackets rewritten the next time a mining code is reopened. Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali already have these structures; West Africa as a whole is where the 12 percent top-bracket figure comes from.

2. Wealth-sharing arrangements

Guatemala’s Escobal consultation is the sharpest example, but the pattern is visible in Equinox’s Ejido-by-Ejido land-access work at Los Filos and in the quieter provincial-participation discussions that arose in multiple presentations. These arrangements sit outside the formal fiscal code but function economically as one, and because they are negotiated project-by-project, they are the hardest line items for sell-side models to standardize. Expect pressure to raise the number each time a restart is requested.

3. Permitting speed as a de facto royalty

Paramount Gold Nevada [$150.03M, $1.79 USD] is a useful illustration of the time-as-tax version of this. Rachel Goldman, the CEO, put it this way at Grassy Mountain in Oregon:

“Oregon has never rejected a mine before. They’ve simply never had a project which tested their permitting regime.” — Rachel Goldman, CEO, Paramount Gold Nevada

A jurisdiction that does not say no but also does not say yes collects an implicit royalty in the form of time, and at these cost-of-capital levels the NPV drag is real. Morocco’s weeks-to-months permit turnaround is the flip side of the same coin. Watch which jurisdictions are structurally willing to move quickly. That list is shorter than it was two cycles ago.

Where this leaves investors

None of the above amounts to a forecast. Fiscal regimes move bespoke by jurisdiction, and the single word that most reliably predicts the next move is “election” or “coup” or “invasion”. What the Mining Forum Europe floor did offer, though, is a useful reframing: treat the fiscal regime line of a mine model the way one ought to treat the gold price itself: as a live variable, not a country flag in the footer.

For sell-side models, the implication is narrow and concrete. A West African producer run at a flat NSR, a PNG producer at a blended effective tax rate, or a Mexican asset at the terms embedded in a 2022 feasibility study is being modeled on inputs that were accurate once and have a non-trivial probability of being wrong now. At gold prices that trade with a 4-handle and occasionally flirt with a 5-handle, that probability compounds quickly.

For equity investors, the implication is broader. The trading premium the Canadian intermediates have accumulated over the last two years, the one that anchors the ASX-TSX valuation gap of $22,000-versus-$12,000-per-production-ounce headline, is arguably the market’s best first-order attempt at pricing this in. It is not, strictly speaking, a Canada-versus-rest trade, even though that is how it looks on the surface. It is a fiscal-resilience trade. The producers whose host governments cannot re-price them faster than the commodity is re-pricing itself are the ones carrying the premium. The producers whose host governments can are the ones carrying the discount. That spread is unlikely to narrow in a bull market because it is the bull market.

Sources: company presentations and associated Q&A from Mining Forum Europe 2026. Company links point to presentation recordings. Market capitalization and share price figures in square brackets reflect the April 17, 2026, close in the currency of primary listing (USD unless otherwise noted). Numbers cited in the body reflect what management stated on stage and on panels; please do your own work before sizing a position. It’s a large volume of presentations in a short time frame — mistakes can be made!

Agnico Eagle Mines (TSX/NYSE: AEM) has announced three transactions worth nearly US$2.8 billion which will consolidate its position in Finland’s Central Lapland Greenstone Belt.

It comes after Agnico chief operating officer, Nunavut, Quebec & Europe Dominique Girard told the Mining Forum Europe last week that the company’s 220,000 ounce per annum Kittilä mine in Finland was still a core asset.

The transactions announced on Monday will take Agnico’s landholding in the region to 2492 square kilometres and resources to 6.8 million ounces.

Agnico said the deals gave its Finnish portfolio the potential to evolve into a world-class multi‑decade gold production hub producing around 500,000ozpa.

“These transactions deliver on our long‑standing regional strategy and build on our more than 20 years of best-in-class operating experience in Finland to establish another multi‑asset, multi‑decade platform in our portfolio within a world‑class gold belt,” Agnico president and CEO Ammar Al-Joundi said.

“This approach mirrors how we have successfully built value across our Canadian platforms and represents an important next chapter for our Finland business.”

Kittilä and Ikkari combined

The largest of the three deals is the C$2.9 billion acquisition of Rupert Resources (TSX: RUP).

Each Rupert Share will be exchanged for upfront consideration of 0.0401 of an Agnico share, equating to roughly C$12 per share and contingent consideration of up to C$3 that is payable in cash upon certain milestones being achieved over the next decade, including resource and production milestones.

The transaction represents a 67% premium to Rupert’s last closing price.

Agnico already owns 13.9% of Rupert, having invested in the company in February 2020.

The transaction will give Agnico ownership of the 3.5Moz Ikkari project, 50km from Kittilä.

A February 2025 prefeasibility study identified the potential for Ikkari to produce 227,000ozpa of gold over the first 10 years of its life.

Agnico said the integration of Ikkari and Kittilä was expected to generate operating and development synergies of up to US$500 million.

Agnico plans to spend around US$20 million on exploration at Ikkari over the next 18 months and will aim to complete an updated internal evaluation for the optimised mine design by the end of 2027.

Other deals

Agnico also announced it would acquire Aurion Resources (TSXV: AU) for C$481 million in cash, a 46% premium.

It already owns 9.9% of Aurion.

Agnico has also entered into an agreement with B2Gold (TSX: BTO) to acquire B2Gold’s 70% interest in the Fingold JV for US$325 million in cash.

Aurion holds the remaining 30% interest in the Fingold JV and has waived its right of first refusal over the sale of B2Gold’s interest in the Fingold JV.

Aurion holds 761 square kilometres of ground within the Central Lapland Greenstone Belt, including the land held by the Fingold JV.

Agnico said the consolidated property was underexplored with several discoveries made only drilled to less than 30m depth.

The company is planning a US$60-100 million regional exploration program over three years.

Separately, Agnico and B2Gold have agreed to enter into a non-exclusive collaboration agreement focused on knowledge sharing and cooperation across their respective operations in Nunavut, Canada.

Agnico to maintain returns

Agnico said it remained committed to delivering strong returns to shareholders in 2026 via a combination of the dividend and share repurchases.

Agnico paid US$803 million in dividends in 2025 and repurchased US$600 million worth of shares.

It said it still intended to increase the share repurchase limit to US$2 billion next month.

“The company will evaluate opportunities to reduce dilution associated with these transactions throughout the remainder of 2026, including potentially returning the proceeds of portfolio investment sales to shareholders through share buybacks,” it said.

As of the end of December, Agnico was in a net cash position of US$2.67 billion with cash of US$2.86 billion and debt of US$196 million.

The company will report its first quarter results on May 1.

The capex wave is real, but differently shaped than in 2009-2012

A capex wave is developing, even if it looks very restrained in detail. Counting only the builds that are either funded or in execution among the 63 of 70 companies that presented, the aggregate capital intent on the floor was in the range of $10 to $12 billion, spread over the next three to four years. The top of that stack is dominated by a handful of large projects that now have both the balance sheet and the permits to move forward.

What makes this project cohort different from the 2010 to 2012 set is that each project has been right-sized thoroughly before the trucks arrived. Pan American Silver's La Colorada expansion is, arguably, the cleanest illustration. In the prior design, the capex line was close to $3 billion, and the mine plan targeted maximum throughput. In the version management presented this year, the capex was $1.9B, the project is sized to mine the high-grade structures within the skarn rather than maximum tons, and the entire program is funded from existing cash and ongoing cash flow while the company continues to return roughly $100 million per quarter to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. That is a very different capital posture from the last bull market, and versions of it turned up in almost every producer presentation on the floor.

Right-sizing is the dominant capex discipline

Vista Gold‘s [$324.68M, $2.24] Mount Todd story was the most straightforward example of what right-sizing looks like in practice. The prior feasibility study estimated capex of over $1 billion for a 50,000-ton-per-day operation. The version presented this year cuts the build to 15,000 tons per day and $425M of capex, achieved mostly by raising the cutoff grade from 0.35 to 0.5 grams per ton and redesigning the pit. The economics at $3,300 gold now show a $2.2B NPV and a close-to-45 % IRR, with a doubling of the 15,000 tpd base left as future optionality rather than a day-one commitment. The old version was unfinanceable for a junior. The new version is financeable and preserves upside, particularly by giving senior miners a way to test the project before buying it and creating a market expectation for a full-size endeavor.

The same playbook turned up under different labels throughout the event. Paramount [$150.03M, $1.79] redesigned Grassy Mountain as an underground mine rather than an open pit, and is waiting for the DFS refresh before putting a new capex number around it. Aura Minerals [$9.14B, $109.14] has institutionalized the discipline as a build strategy, with Almas built for $75M and Borborema built on a comparably small-capex basis, each then expanded with internally generated cash once the initial plant had paid itself down. Aura’s own management framed it plainly, saying they build fast, minimize capex, get payback quickly, and then expand using the proceeds rather than tapping the market for equity or debt. Tesoro‘s [$129.36M, $0.72] El Zorro in Chile is scoped at $250M to $350M largely because the company has resolved water (desalination brine) and power through early MOUs rather than building standalone infrastructure. In almost every case, the capex number looks smaller than the equivalent project would have looked a decade ago, not because the assets are smaller but because management is deliberately constraining the first-phase build.

Brownfield is where the cheap capex lives

If right-sizing is the discipline of choice for new builds, brownfield acquisition remains a cheat code that several companies are exploiting. The best example was West Red Lake [$341.75M, $0.83], which acquired the Madsen mine out of bankruptcy for roughly $6M after the previous operator (Pure Gold) had sunk about $350M into the build. The company is now spending its capital on underground definition drilling (200,000 meters at six-meter centers over the last 18 months) and satellite development at Fork and Rowan, with the existing 800 to 1,500-ton-per-day Madsen mill as the central hub. Nothing in the program resembles a greenfield capex wave. It is essentially an exploration and tie-in program sitting on someone else’s sunk cost.

Discovery [$6.47B, $7.99], Orla and Minera Alamos [$531.18M, $4.92] all told variations of the same story. Discovery acquired the Porcupine complex from Newmont for $200M in cash and $75M in equity, and announced on March 2, 2026 the acquisition of Glencore’s Kidd operations in Timmins (KidMed site and tailings facility) as processing capacity for expansion. Orla bought Musselwhite from Newmont for $850M in Q1 2025 and is running the portfolio alongside South Railroad and Camino Rojo under a single capital plan. Minera Alamos acquired the Pan mine from Equinox Gold [$12.32B, $15.63] at the beginning of October 2025, and is building Copperstone and Cerro de Oro around it as a low-capex multi-asset Mexican and US business aiming for roughly 150,000 ounces of production on about $130M of capital. Maritana [$176.22M, $0.68] in Western Australia (the former Horizon Minerals, renamed the week of the forum) is refurbishing the Black Swan nickel plant into a gold operation for $160M, a capex figure the company claims is about half that of a new build and roughly twelve months faster. The pattern across all of these is that capex per ounce on brownfield sits well below the per-ounce capex on any new greenfield pit in the same jurisdiction.

Low capital-intensity mine plans are being deliberately favored

Several of the development stories presented at the forum were structured specifically to minimize capital intensity in the first phase, with the implicit argument that in this commodity price environment simpler and faster is worth more than bigger and better. The set below was striking for how low some of the numbers are.

• Q Gold Resources [$38.70M, $0.25], Quartz Mountain (Oregon): PEA released one week before the forum, $290M initial capex for 135,000 ounces per year, 1.8 year payback, 55% IRR at $3,265 gold. Heap leach for the first five years, then conventional milling.

• Amex Exploration [$534.26M, $3.78], Perron (Quebec): $193.9M Phase 1 capex, with a $50M bulk sample program the company expects to largely self-fund through pre-production gold and toll milling arrangements. Post-tax 78.8% IRR, even at $2,500 gold; 0.6-year payback at higher prices.

• Lahontan Gold [$113.02M, $0.32] (Nevada): $135M total capex, 18-month payback at $4,000 gold, with Phase 1 deliberately scoped under a 640-acre EA rather than the full EIS to compress permitting by about a year.

• Liberty Gold [$594.85M, $1.13], Black Pine (Idaho): $327M capex, sub-two-year payback at $3,000 gold, with the project on a FAST 41 critical minerals permit schedule that sets a federal record of decision deadline of January 5, 2029.

• Contango [$753.84M, $24.71], Manh Choh (Alaska): The original DSO build cost about $70M because the ore is trucked to Fort Knox for tolling rather than processed on site. This model is now being extended to Lucky Shot, which Contango has scoped as a DSO into Fort Knox, with roughly $21M in feasibility work this year and $35M the following year.

• Rio2 [$1.12B, $2.13], Phoenix Gold / Fenix (Chile): Construction finished in January 2026, and the mine is now in production. Management stated on stage that the company does not intend to pursue any further capital raises, financings, or borrowings, and that the 80,000-ton-per-day expansion PFS is targeted for release at the end of Q1 2026.

The common thread among these names is that grade, location, or metallurgy allows the first-phase mine plan to avoid a conventional large mill. When management can credibly argue that an operating asset can be built for under $400M and repaid within 24 months at current prices, the financing equation changes completely, and the equity story can carry itself through construction without a mid-build dilution event.

How the capex is actually getting funded

Funding is where the cycle has moved the most since 2011. Almost nobody at the forum is relying primarily on the traditional senior bank syndicate to build their mine. The mix now looks like this:

The most important aspect of this table is the absence of a single dominant capex funding model. Where once the sequence was equity raise, then senior bank term loan, then construction drawdown, the 2026 mix is a blended stack that takes liquidity from wherever it is cheapest and leaves the equity line as a last resort rather than a first stop.

What the streamers are signaling

To triangulate on the capex wave, listen to the people writing the non-dilutive checks. Wheaton Precious Metals’ headline transaction was the $4.43B BHP Antamina stream, completed in February 2026 and described by management as the largest precious metals streaming transaction ever. Wheaton has invested nearly $19 billion in streams since inception and is forecasting more than $10 billion in operating cash flow through 2028 at current metal prices. Royal Gold deployed $5.3B of capital over a six-month period through the Sandstorm Gold and Horizon Copper acquisitions (together the largest corporate acquisition in the sector’s history), along with a $1B gold stream on a First Quantum-operated mine in Zambia and an equity investment in the Winsa copper project in Ecuador. Triple Flag deployed $350M into new streams over the last year and expects its production profile to grow to the 140,000 to 150,000 gold-equivalent ounce range by 2030.

Three messages came through clearly from the streamer panels. The first is that the pipeline is not the constraint. Each of the three had liquidity above $1 billion at year's end and described the 2026 deal calendar as the busiest they had seen. The second is that counterparty capex is genuinely large, and streamers are absorbing a meaningful share of the financing role that banks used to play, particularly for development and expansion situations at producers who do not want to issue equity at current multiples. The third is that pricing discipline is still in place. Each of the three referenced deal sizes in the $300M to $500M range is the sweet spot, with hurdle returns sustained at 8 to 10 percent on an initial basis and margins maintained above 80 percent. When streamers say they are not stretching on price, they are also saying that miners are not so desperate for capital that they will accept bad terms. Both sides of the market are behaving.

Payback math defers hedging demand

The most underreported piece of the capex story is the payback math that companies were quoting. At current prices, the projects going forward are not marginal. A handful of illustrative figures from the floor:

• Amex quoted a 0.6-year payback at $3,500 gold on the Perron Phase 1 build and a 78.8% post-tax IRR at $2,500 gold with a 0.6-year payback.

• Q Gold quoted a 1.8-year payback and a 55% IRR at $3,265 gold on Quartz Mountain.

• Tesoro quoted an 85% IRR and an NPV well in excess of $1 billion on El Zorro at $3,950 gold, scaling to a ~$2B NPV and a triple-digit IRR at higher prices.

• Lahontan described an 18-month payback at $4,000 gold on a $135M build.

• Liberty showed a sub-two-year payback at $3,000 gold on Black Pine, with $125M of NPV sensitivity per $100 move in gold.

• Aura quoted a 64% expected rate of return on Almas at sub-$2,000 gold and an IRR over 80% on Borborema at $2,600 gold.

• Newcore Gold [$137.32M, $0.48] ran Enchi at $3,000 gold and showed a post-tax NPV of $970M with a half-year payback.

Teams that can quote numbers like those have no reason to hedge future production into the build, which is why few people on the floor were discussing price protection. Indeed, investors are still asking for full exposure to the gold price rather than safety first. The producers with operating mines do not want to cap their upside, and the developers do not need to cap anything because the paybacks clear well inside any realistic downside scenario. That is a very different mood from the one this industry was in 20 years ago.

Capex inflation is real, but it is being absorbed

The one area where candor was in shorter supply was labor and equipment inflation. Almost every team acknowledged it in passing. Skeena‘s management flagged that the original 2023 feasibility all-in sustaining cost of under $550 per ounce would likely reset to the $750 to $800 range by the time construction is complete. Ramelius described a cost program targeting approximately $2,000 per ounce all-in sustaining in Australian dollar terms, equivalent to roughly $1,400 US. Nobody claimed cost inflation was behind them, but nobody described it as a project-killing risk either. The strategy for absorbing it is almost identical across the group: raise the cutoff grade, mine a narrower and higher-grade portion of the resource, preserve expansion optionality for later, and keep the first build modular. That is a sensible response to a cost environment that has not yet stabilized, and it is part of why capex numbers look smaller than they otherwise would.

Implications for allocation

Pulling the pieces together, the capex picture coming out of Mining Forum Europe 2026 is not the 2011 capex picture, and the differences matter to investors. Capex is larger in aggregate than it was three years ago, but the projects carrying most of the dollars have been right-sized, phased and pre-funded in ways that make them much harder to blow up. The dominant financing model has shifted away from bank debt toward a layered stack of internal cash, streams, royalties, high yield, concessional government support, and equity reserved for the cleanest opportunities.

Brownfield acquisitions are now the cheapest capex a mining company can deploy, and the set of majors willing to sell non-core assets has made that an actual strategy rather than an aspiration. The streamers have more capital than they know what to do with, which will keep the non-dilutive funding channel open even if the equity window narrows. And exploration spending is rising across almost every name, which is the closest thing on the floor to a shared statement of confidence in the cycle.

For a capital allocator working in this sector, the corporate presenters at MFE 2026 pointed toward a handful of clear preferences. Producers that are self-funding growth while returning cash look very well positioned, and Ramelius, Pan American, Fortuna, Aya, K92, and Orla are the names that warrant closer work. Developers with modular mine plans, short paybacks, and a non-dilutive funding component look more investible than the traditional large-build stories, and Q Gold, Amex, Liberty, Lahontan, Tesoro, and Rio2 (just in production) fit that profile. Operators of brownfield acquisitions that are now turning into hub-and-spoke systems are the quiet compounders of the cohort, with West Red Lake, Maritana, Minera Alamos, and Discovery all fitting the description. The large, genuinely capital-intensive builds (Perpetua, Greatland, Harmony‘s Eva Copper, Osisko Development) will be defined by execution rather than financing, and construction metrics should come into view before sizing decisions. Streamers look structurally well-positioned to keep compounding through the cycle, with Wheaton, Royal Gold, and Triple Flag all describing deal pipelines that the equity market has not fully priced in. IAMGOLD [$11.21B, $19.25] sits in the same category, where execution reporting will matter more than model optionality.

None of this is a forecast about the gold price or any particular stock price, and none of it is a case that the cycle has to end well or early. It is simply a reading of what the companies themselves are doing with the cash. On that evidence, the capex wave finally arriving looks more disciplined than any prior wave in this industry’s recent history, and the companies deploying it well should continue to compound for some time before the industry starts behaving the way industries at cycle peaks always eventually behave.

Sources: company presentations and associated Q&A from Mining Forum Europe 2026. Company links point to presentation recordings. Market capitalization and share price figures in square brackets reflect the April 17, 2026, close in the currency of primary listing (USD unless otherwise noted). Numbers cited in the body reflect what management stated on stage and on panels; please do your own work before sizing a position. It’s a large volume of presentations in a short time frame - mistakes can be made!

Notices

We have taken every care to ensure this data is accurate, but Denver Gold Group cannot accept responsibility for any sourcing variances, mistakes, errors, or omissions, or for any action taken in reliance on it. Use of this data is governed by Denver Gold Group’s Terms of Use.

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Australia has typically been a no-go zone for the major royalty and streaming companies, but times appear to be changing.

In mid-February, Wheaton Precious Metals (TSX: WPM) and BHP (ASX: BHP) signed the world’s largest-ever precious metals streaming deal over the silver produced at the Antamina copper mine in Peru.

Wheaton vice president, corporate development Neil Burns told the Mining Forum Europe in Zürich last week that Australia appeared to be opening up to royalty and streaming companies.

“It’s interesting, because although Antamina is not located in Australia, BHP certainly is based there,” he said.

“And we did hear that that really got the attention of companies in Australia to have such a large transaction done in the streaming space.

“I’ve heard that after they made their announcement, all the other mining companies in Australia that were having their conference calls, [streaming] came up in questions, and to my pleasure, they all responded that certainly, they would look at streaming.”

Wheaton followed the BHP deal up with its first stream in Australia with copper developer KGL Resources (ASX: KGL) over the Jervois project in the Northern Territory.

The US$300 million agreement covers the silver and gold by-products to be produced from the proposed mine.

“We have been looking in Australia for quite some time,” Burns said.

“There’s been a bit of apprehension in the country about streams due to some streams that didn’t go well – more royalties than streams – years ago, but we think there has been some difficulty in Australia with taking on onerous debt and having hedge books blow up.

“There’s been a number of those instances. I think they’re really recognising the benefit of streaming and the lower risk that comes with it, so I’m hoping to see a lot more opportunities.”

Echoing Burns’ comments was Royal Gold Inc’s (NASDAQ: RGLD) senior VP, corporate development Dan Breeze, who indicated the company would look to Australia for new opportunities.

“The market is very robust,” he said.

“I think that the transaction that Wheaton and BHP announced really cast a spotlight on that potential area of growth in terms of minor metals in these massive deposits.

“Australia’s been a very hard market for us to break into for legacy reasons, and that’s changing.”

Franco in Australia

Late last year, Franco-Nevada Corporation (TSX: FNV) CEO Paul Brink visited Australia and vowed the company planned to grow its business there.

That plan has started to bear fruit with the company announcing a A$220 million funding package with Minerals 260 (ASX: MI6) over the 4.5 million ounce Bullabulling gold project near Kalgoorlie in Western Australia.

Franco-Nevada already held a 1% royalty over certain Bullabulling tenements but paid A$170 million to increase its total royalty over the project to 2.45%.

Franco-Nevada also invested A$50 million in Minerals 260 by subscribing for a 4.9% stake at an issue price of A45c per share, a 7% premium to the last closing price.

Speaking at a Resources Rising Stars event in Adelaide this month, Minerals 260 managing director Luke McFadyen said the deal was Franco-Nevada’s largest ever royalty acquisition in Australia

“We have busted the myth that royalties are not attractive funding options for developers in Australia,” he said.

“The usual path is you ring your broker, you discount your stock by 10% or 20% and you go all over again.

“One of the reasons why this was attractive to us is because it didn’t follow that.

“It priced the stock at a premium. The royalty was priced at what we would be at in production, not today, and since the stock has gone up 50% since that announcement just a few weeks ago, we think that’s validation that it was the right decision for the board to do.”

More deals flowing

Earlier this month, Alicanto Minerals (ASX: AQI), which recently acquired the Mt Henry gold project in WA, secured an A$18.1 million funding package from Stria Lithium Inc (TSXV: SRA).

The funding package comprised an upfront cash payment of A$5 million from Stria in return for a 1% net smelter return royalty over Mt Henry, 4 million Stria shares, valued at A$3.1 million; and the potential for a further A$10 million cash investment from Stria if Alicanto reports a resource of at least 2 million ounces at more than 0.8 grams per tonne gold.

The deal represents the first royalty for Stria, which is run by the former Trident Royalties team.

Chalice Mining (ASX: CHN) is developing the large Gonneville deposit outside of Perth which will produce palladium, platinum, nickel, copper, cobalt, gold and silver.

Managing director Alex Dorsch said the company had received interest from royalty and streaming companies.

“I think the streamers and royalty companies are still predominantly looking for precious metals deals and that is really where the focus is, but certainly we are hearing about base metal streams becoming a thing as well,” he said in an interview.

“For us, obviously, we’ve got three co-products, three by-products, so the by-products are very, very obvious things for us to look at in terms of financing.”

Let me try to pull the signals out of the noise after sitting through the keynotes, the capital markets panel, and clocking every issuer presentation I could get to. Below are the themes that showed up again and again, the data points worth filing, and the moments I think actually mattered for the industry.

The de facto gold standard nobody is announcing

If you want one idea to carry out of Mining Forum Europe 2026, it is this. The freezing of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves in 2022 was a structural break, not a headline. Central banks outside the G7 have been buying gold relentlessly ever since, and they have not stopped. Nicky Shiels of MKS Pamp framed the thesis with her “three Ds”: debased, diversify, de-dollarize. The numbers are hard to argue with.

• Central banks now hold roughly 1.1 billion ounces of gold, about ten times annual primary mine supply and ten times the global ETF pile.

• Emerging market central banks would need to buy about 22,000 tons to catch up with developed market gold-to-forex ratios. That is seven years of total mine output.

• Turkey sold 120 tons in Q1 and still has not dented its accumulation trend. France repatriated gold from New York to Paris. Nobody in the room thought that was a coincidence.

• Gold has a higher market value on central bank balance sheets than US Treasury holdings do. It is a larger share of the world's official reserves than the euro.

Chris Wood, Jefferies macro strategist, put it plainly in a packed capital markets keynote. We are mid-cycle, not late-cycle, because we have done all of this without a meaningful dollar depreciation cycle. When the dollar finally rolls over, the second leg begins. His target methodology yields $6,800 per ounce on a disposable income basis and roughly $13,000 per ounce against US M2.

Zoltan Poszar had some parallel and even contrary insights, but we can’t share them because it was a Chatham House Rules presentation.

Discipline is the tell, and it looks a lot like fear

The 2011 cycle ended with mega mergers, bad projects financed at bad prices, and a lot of people who should have known better building expensive mines into a falling market. You can spend a whole career unlearning that, and miners are doing it. Neil Adshead of Centerra / Cupel Advisory was blunt on the risks of “capital misallocation” in his keynote presentation and in the panel discussion. Miners do not believe the current gold price. They are running reserves at prices close to half of spot. Boards are sitting on $10 million to $30 million in paper gains on personal shareholdings. They do not want to commit $3 billion to $5 billion to a project that pays back in ten years.

You can frame that as discipline or you can frame it as fear. Either way, the effect is the same. The North American gold sector is projected to throw off about $35 billion in free cash flow in 2026. Average balance sheets across the majors are expected to cross $42 billion by year end. Very little of that cash is going into new mines. Most of it is going to dividends, buybacks, and selective M&A of things already built.

Capital allocation, by the numbers

Across the sixty-three company presentations I tracked, the posture was remarkably uniform. Here is the rough distribution of how producers are talking about their cash.

The institutional void

If central banks are the buyer of last resort, US institutional investors are the buyer of never. Shiels walked us through the math. Retail and family office allocations to gold are running under 1% of portfolios in the US, down from the 2011 peak near 1.6%. Generalist mutual fund complexes have vanishingly small positions. Wood said that when he was on the sell side covering the sector, most generalist portfolio managers in America knew only two gold mining stocks: Newmont and Barrick; the sum total of their sector knowledge.

Rather than accusing capital allocators of apathy, it can be put down to simple structural exclusion after years in the doldrums and on the margins of the big stories in the markets. The eventual reallocation, when it comes, is unlikely to be a gentle drift. 60/40 portfolios cannot add 2% to gold without moving GDX several multiples higher from here, because the float is not there. Retail got the memo in Q1. Silver ran from around $60 to $120 and back to $60 in what one panelist, not unfairly, called meme stock behavior, with leverage as high as 1 to 100 on CFDs in some jurisdictions. That was retail front running a move that has not started in institutional allocations.

The ETF and options flow data I reviewed during breaks support the same conclusion. US investors are still dramatically underweight an asset class that has already doubled. It very much reinforces that we have a mid-cycle mood.

Canada ate the koala

A very entertaining keynote at the forum was John Forward of Lowell Resources on the ASX-to-TSX valuation gap. I am going to give him the space he deserves because the thesis is so clean and the numbers are so striking.

For most of the last decade, Australian juniors ran circles around Canadian ones. Post 2024, that reversed and the reasons are mechanical, not ideological.

• Canadian juniors can “hibernate” on roughly $100,000 in overhead (audit, insurance, listing fees). Australian juniors burn closer to $1 million before anyone does anything useful. That drives relentless capital raising, which drives relentless equity dilution.

• Across twenty intermediate gold producers he tracked, ASX-listed names issued roughly seven times as many shares as their TSX peers over the same period.

• Flow-through shares still fund about 70% of Canadian exploration. The Australian equivalent ended in 2024. There is simply no parallel capital channel Down Under.

• On a per-production-ounce basis, TSX intermediate golds trade around $22,000 per ounce of EV. ASX peers trade around $12,000. Over the twelve months to April 2025, TSX EV per ounce rose about 2.3x, and ASX about 1.7x. The gap is widening, not closing.

• In 2026, John expects Canadian junior fundraising to exceed Australian fundraising for the first time in years.

“The Canadian brown bear hibernates better than the Australian koala. And the koala isn’t actually a bear.”

Australians are spendthrifts. Canadians are misers with share capital. If you are looking for leverage into the next leg, you want misers, but never count the Aussies out of any innovation drive as the sector continues to boom (visit Perth’s golden triangle to see a gigantic mining wealth effect in play).

Juniors find, majors buy

The capital misallocation discussion doubled as a quiet commercial for Centerra’s exploration portfolio model. Neil Adshead now manages a roughly $25 million junior investment book for Centerra. Two years in, it is worth north of $40 million, and the major has optioned three projects into its own drill program out of that pool. Agnico Eagle runs something similar at seventy names. The lesson most of the room took from this is that majors are bad at greenfield discovery and juniors are good at it. The actual lesson is less dramatic: Majors are bad at drilling holes because they have too much money and too many meetings. Juniors are good at drilling holes because if they do not drill, they die.

Expect this model to spread as the bigger royalty and streaming names expand exploration investment mandates. Expect more majors to anchor juniors with minority positions and offtake-style first rights. For juniors sitting on a classy North American project, the prospects for a bidding war are outstanding.

Permitting is the gate; jurisdiction is the key

For company presentations, the single most common constraint discussed, far ahead of labor, power, or capex inflation, was permitting, which remains the gate. Everything else is geology and cost accounting. The map that emerged was roughly this:

What wasn’t said

For a forum this large and representative of the mining investment space, some of the silences were as useful as the statements.

• Almost nobody talked about hedging. Producers are leaving upside open.

• Nobody pitched mega capex. Greenfield growth was framed as optionality, not commitment.

• Nobody defended cost inflation. They described it, they countered it with operational specifics, they did not pretend it was over.

• Nobody defended single jurisdiction concentration as a feature. Those that had it apologized for it implicitly by offering exploration optionality elsewhere.

• Very few developers were bold enough to say their permits guaranteed. Those that could (Liberty Gold, Paramount’s Grassy Mountain, Osisko Development’s Caribou) wore it like a medal.

Macro headwinds worth tracking

Wood made the case that the right tail risk to a gold target near $7,000 is not the Fed and not the dollar but the US Treasury. With 84.9% of US Treasury issuance in the last year inside one year maturities, and net interest plus entitlements running at 92.7% of federal receipts, the Fed does not have the room to stay hawkish even with a hawk (Walsh) now at the helm. Formal yield curve control is unlikely, but financial repression via negative real rates, credit controls, and selective regulation is very likely. Both outcomes are gold positive.

On the AI complex, Chris argued the hyperscalers have become the capital expenditure whales of the US economy. Capex as a share of operating cash flow at the four biggest US hyperscalers is running around 84%. He thinks the large language models end up looking like a commodity industry with airline style economics rather than winner takes all. If he is right, the unwind of that capex cycle lands sometime in the next eighteen months and it lands hard on the S&P, which has made gold miners look small even as they have doubled. A hyperscaler crack is the shock that forces the institutional reallocation I described above.

Memorable lines from the floor

“Gold miners don’t believe in the current gold price.”
Neil Adshead

“Aussies are spendthrifts. Canadians are misers with share capital.”
John Forwood

“Silver became almost a meme stock. People putting down 1 to 100 leverage.”
Nikki Shiels

“Central banks now own more gold at current market price than US Treasury bonds.”
Chris Wood

“Once it’s up and running, it’s wonderful. You can keep levying more and more tax and royalty on it.”
Neil Adshead, on why the jurisdictional risk premium is going to widen, not narrow.

Bottom line

Mining Forum Europe 2026 was not yet the top. The top looks like confidence, capex commitments, and coverage. This forum was careful, disciplined, and underpositioned. Central banks are buying gold as a monetary reset in all but name. US institutions are still outside. Producers are returning cash rather than building. Canadian juniors have quietly become the best structured leverage into the next leg. Juniors still do the discovery. Majors will pay up for it on the other side. Permitting is the gate, jurisdiction is the key, and the people who get both right in Canada, Nevada, Alaska, and select pockets of West Africa will own the next five years.

Cupel Advisory Corp’s Neil Adshead has made the case for why the major mining companies should be using some of their excess cash to invest in junior miners.

Speaking at the Mining Forum Europe in Zürich this week, Adshead, an economic geologist and former fund manager, said gold companies were making “absolutely crazy” amounts of money.

“We’ve seen the mining companies generate so much money they’re almost a little bit unsure what to do with some of it, and I think building a proper equity portfolio would be a smart move,” he said.

Adshead cited figures by Canaccord Genuity, which suggested the North American gold sector would generate US$35 billion of free cashflow this year and would have a total of US$42 billion of cash on their balance sheets by the end of the year.

“What are they going to do with that cash? We’ve seen dividends increase and share re-purchases,” Adshead said.

“Who really buys mining companies’ shares for the dividend? I don’t think many of us do. I think most of us would prefer to see the mining company increase their exposure to the metal units, because, I would argue, most of us invest in mining companies because we believe in the commodity.”

One of the ways mining companies can spend their cash is via exploration, but there’s yet to be significant increases across the large producers.

“I used to work for a major mining company many years ago and I would argue that we spent a lot of money, but it wasn’t particularly spent that wisely in terms of unit dollars spent for what they actually achieved,” Adshead said.

“I think the juniors generally do better exploration than the majors per dollar spent.”

Of 17 “newsworthy” gold discoveries made in the past decade, 12 were made by juniors.

Many of those juniors, including Great Bear Resources, GT Gold, De Grey Mining, Reunion Gold and Spartan Resources, have since been acquired.

“If I was an investor in a major and interested in their exploration function, I might be more interested in them taking that capital and investing in juniors and letting the juniors do the work, rather than the major doing it themselves,” Adshead said.

He said a company like BHP had a huge exploration budget but probably didn’t drill many holes.

“They’ll do lots of fancy office-based number-crunching type things, but they won’t get that many geos on the ground drilling holes, and that’s what you need to do to make discoveries.”

The new poster child

Adshead said Billiton was active in the 1990s in investing in juniors until it was acquired by BHP, then BHP had its Acorn project in the early 2000s.

It had more recently launched BHP Xplor to mentor junior explorers.

Adshead described Agnico Eagle Mines (TSX: AEM) as a poster child for investing in juniors.

Agnico chief operating officer, Nunavut, Quebec & Europe Dominique Girard told the same event the company was invested in 60-70 juniors.

Adshead has been hired by Centerra Gold (TSX: CG) on a part-time basis to take US$25 million and build a portfolio of early-stage gold explorers focusing on eastern Canada and the Great Basin of Nevada.

“The objective here was to gain exposure to high quality in greenfields gold exploration risk … so I look for risk. I want high-quality risk. I’m looking for the best exploration teams,” he said.

“The key is not about the share price performance. Everybody’s happy – the portfolio’s up over 100% which is roughly close to a US$20 million gain on the balance sheet.

“That’s not really the aim of it. The aim of it is that the exploration team has then got access to the kind of early access – not priority over shareholders – but because you’re close to the story, because you own the stock, and you’ve been to site, and you know the people, they tend to call you up.”

Centerra has optioned four projects from the juniors, three of which will be drilled this year.

“If one of these turns into a new gold discovery in Ontario, for example, then it’s going to be an incredibly successful strategy,” Adshead said.

The strategy had given Centerra a reputation as a partner of choice.

Deals are coming to Centerra now from left field … so it’s a great business advantage for the company, too,” Adshead said.

Miners as asset managers

“The more I think about this, if I ever went back into asset management, I’d love to do it inside a gold mining company, not in the public market, and I’ll explain why,” Adshead said.

Adshead said there was one capital source and little reporting and no marketing required.

“It’s a bit like a family office. You’ve got sticky money. You’ve got essentially zero redemption risk,” he said.

“One of my biggest sweaty moments as a fund manager was 25% of the fund could disappear every quarter, so I was restricted on what I could buy from a liquidity point of view, which is a little bit scary.”

Being inside a gold miner would also ensure access to a broad spectrum of technical expertise.

For the junior, it was all about access to supportive, and often recurring, capital.

“The junior having a major mining company as a partner is pretty good. That money is generally not going to disappear,” Adshead said.

“I like to almost take the pressure off the junior having to constantly look at the share price and raise money. I want you to have US$30 million, I want you to go to design a 60,000m drill program for the next 30 months.

“You don’t even have to worry about the market and share price. Focus on geology and saving the make a discovery.”

Adshead said a portfolio strategy was a good one for major and mid-tier miners, provided it was managed properly.

“I think I’d like to see a major hire an experienced portfolio manager plus a technical analyst, if the portfolio manager didn’t have the technical experience themselves,” he said.

“I think if they were properly incentivised, it’d be a great addition to the growth profile for every major mining company that’s generating a lot of cash right now – and they all are.”

Greatland Resources (ASX/LSE: GGP) is now Australia’s third-largest listed gold company, less than 18 months since becoming a producer.

The company’s market capitalisation surpassed A$10 billion for the first time this month, putting it only behind Northern Star Resources (ASX: NST) and Evolution Mining (ASX: EVN).

In December 2024, Greatland acquired 100% of the Telfer mine and the 70% stake in the Havieron project it didn’t already own, both in Western Australia’s Paterson Province, from Newmont Corporation (NYSE: NEM) for US$475 million.

That acquisition was paid off in just five months.

“Why have we grown to be Australia’s third largest mining company? We generate more free cashflow per ounce than any other company on the ASX,” Greatland managing director Shaun Day told the Mining Forum Europe in Zürich this week.

“We now have A$1.2 billion in the bank, zero debt and we’ve generated that over 15 months since acquisition.”

The company reported a cash build of A$260 million for the March quarter.

Telfer has produced 249,900 ounces of gold and 11,000 tonnes of copper in the nine months to March 31, and the company is on track to meet or exceed 2026 financial year guidance of 260,000-310,000oz of gold at all-in sustaining costs of A$2400-2800 an ounce.

The rejuvenation of Telfer

Day described Telfer as one of Australia’s most iconic gold assets but there had been long been the perception that the operation was ageing, running out of ore and high cost.

“We’re reinvesting in the site, both in terms of productivity, but importantly in the drill bit,” Day said.

Greatland has already completed half of a planned 240,000m drilling campaign, which resulted in an updated resource of 8 million ounces of gold, up from just 700,000oz.

“We bought an asset that was meant to already be shut down, but I look at my time at Northern Star,” Day said.

Day was chief financial officer at Northern Star when the company acquired four assets from the majors with mine lives of less than 12 months.

“All four of those that we acquired off majors are still operating a decade later, and that is the opportunity, and I think now we’ve kind of been able to demonstrate that opportunity to the market with Telfer,” he said.

Underground development rates have increased from 175m a month to more than 450m per month since acquisition, while recoveries have increased from 81% gold and 71% copper to more than 88% gold and 79% copper.

“We’ve actually taken about one eighth out of our cost structure whilst we’ve delivered that productivity gain,” Day said.

Last month’s resource update included an initial resource of 600,000oz of gold and 35,000t of copper at 2.3 grams per tonne gold and 0.44% copper for the West Dome underground.

“That’s a whole new quartile of the mine that was left untouched for us,” Day said.

“It’s the highest average grade you’ve seen at Telfer since 2005 and it’s just a short 2000m underground horizontal tram to the underground crusher, to the hoist, which has significant capacity.

“That will allow us to probably more than double underground mining tonnes and at a higher grade.”

Telfer has 20 million tonnes per annum of processing capacity, which is the third-largest gold or gold-copper processing centre in Australia.

“This is part of the rejuvenation and rethinking of what Telfer can be, where we focus on one train being high-grade underground ore at significant volumes, coupled with maintaining that open pit,” Day said.

Havieron

The Havieron underground deposit, with a resource of 7Moz of gold and 275,000t of copper, is a greenfields discovery made by Greatland in 2018 but a brownfields development given its proximity to Telfer.

Havieron’s grades are five times higher than Telfer.

Greatland released a feasibility study for the partially developed project in December.

Havieron is expected to produce 266,000ozpa of gold and 9600tpa of copper at AISC of A$1610/oz over 17 years, with ore to be processed through the Telfer plant.

“The opportunity this delivers to Greatland is really extraordinary,” Day said.

Capital costs were forecast at just under A$1.1 billion.

“The primary decline is already 80% down to the orebody, although we’re putting in a second decline from surface, a conveyor decline,” Day said.

Greatland is adding a conveyer decline to take capacity to 4Mtpa to take advantage of Telfer’s processing capacity.

“Havieron’s really important for us as well as part of the rejuvenation of Telfer,” Day said.

“The strongest outcome you get is when you run the two in parallel.”

The project has a base case post-tax net present value (5% discount rate) of A$2.9 billion and internal rate of return of 22.5% at a gold price of A$4500/oz, increasing to a A$5.4 billion NPV and 31.5% IRR at A$6250/oz.

“If we re-ran that spot price today – the Aussie dollar spot price is north of A$7000 – those numbers print even better than A$10 billion of value, even better than a 31.5% IRR, even better than a three-year payback.”

Greatland is awaiting final environmental approval before making a final investment decision, which is expected this year.

“I think a catalyst for value for Greatland is when the market can see there’s a direct pathway to turning on Havieron,” Day said.

Tungsten sweetener

Tungsten is the best performing metal so far this year, surging to a record high of more than US$3000 per metric tonne unit.

Just 10km south of Telfer on a granted mining lease is the O’Callaghans tungsten deposit.

Greatland recently reported a resource of 70Mt at 0.35% tungsten trioxide, 0.3% copper, 0.57% zinc and 0.28% lead for 246,000t of tungsten trioxide, 207,000t of copper, 371,000t of zinc and 182,000t of lead.

“This is arguably the world’s second or third-best tungsten deposit,” Day said.

“We think the tungsten market’s very strong and we have daylighted this by spending the time, energy and effort to make this a JORC resource.”

Day said the company had received multiple inbound inquiries about the project.

“I think it’s another way that we can think about creating shareholder value – whether that means that Greatland has a tungsten division, whether it’s a spin-off or some other way to create value, but it’s something that we are spending time, energy and effort doing,” he said.

“We already have a pretty fantastic organic growth profile, so we’re not looking for something else to do, but certainly tungsten is an important part of Western supply chains for critical minerals, and this is a high-quality tungsten asset – high-grade, high-volume in a tier one jurisdiction, next to existing infrastructure.”

The long-running battle between the ASX and the TSX has taken another turn.

The ASX has outperformed the TSX for many years, prompting a flood of companies to dual list in Australia, including Orezone Gold Corporation (TSX/ASX: ORE) and Capstone Copper (TSX: CS/ASX: CSC).

Delivering a keynote presentation at the Mining Forum Europe in Zürich on Wednesday, Lowell Resources Fund (ASX: LRT) chief investment officer John Forwood referred to it as the battle of the bears – the Canadian brown bear versus the koala.

ASX-listed companies benefit from Australia’s massive pension sector – which is around 60% larger than Canada’s – while Canadian companies are able to raise money through the country’s flow-through share scheme.

The main difference between ASX and TSX-listed miners was the number of shares on issue, which Forwood referred to as the spendthrifts versus the misers.

“The Aussies are the spendthrifts, and they’re very profitable, you could say, with their share capital versus the misers up in Toronto, who are much more careful with their share capital,” he said.

Forwood did a peer comparison of 20 ASX-listed intermediate gold producers and 20 TSX-listed producers.

The Canadian companies had an average of 271 million shares on issue, while the Australians had an average of 1.85 billion.

“That relatively same group of companies in Australia has issued seven times more shares than their Canadian counterparts,” Forwood said.

“You might say, so what? But actually, I think it’s quite important.”

One of the reasons relates to board remuneration.

According to Lowell, ASX board non-executive directors are paid A$60,000-120,000 in cash, but total compensation could be up to A$80,000-200,000 when accounting for equity, depending on the size and stage of the company.

Canadian directors are paid an average of C$15,000-40,000 in cash and C$25,000-80,000 with equity, including options and warrants.

“I think perhaps, one of the reasons for that is that Australian share registers and companies are much more visible,” Forwood said.

“If a director sells some shares of an Aussie company, it has to be announced straight away, and it’s a big black mark against that company in terms of seeing insiders start to sell.”

Lowell is invested in TSX-listed companies, but Forwood said many seemed to be less aware of who was on their share register.

“They don’t know who their shareholders are, so I think that might be a little bit of a factor in that compensation difference,” he said.

Forwood said during a downturn, like brown bears, Canadians were much better at hibernating.

“I was talking to a Canadian company last week, and they said, ‘our annual costs if we stand still and do nothing and go into hibernation are only C$100,000 a year’,” he said.

“Whereas in Australia, I’m on a couple of junior boards, and it’s very, very difficult to get away with an annual cost – even if you’re doing nothing – of less than A$1 million, so in downturns, Aussies have to raise more capital.”

Forwood added that Australians typically raised equity, while Canadians were more likely to finance at the project level via royalty and streaming deals.

TSX junior interest up in smoke

The TSX mining space underperformed the ASX from 2016-18 as money in Canada diverted into marijuana stocks.

“A lot of speculative capital got pulled into pot stocks in Canada, and a lot of it got torched,” Forwood said.

“I think there’s been a long hangover from that in terms of the junior mining sector in particular.”

During the pandemic, interest rates were slashed to zero and both markets performed strongly.

There were 106 new mining listings on the ASX in 2021 alone.

“I think there was only something like less than 20 on the TSXV,” Forwood said.

“So that indicates to me that there was still quite a hangover from the pot stock boom in Canada.”

The period from 2022-24 was weak for both markets, but Toronto drastically underperformed Australia, with roughly twice as much equity being raised on the ASX.

“I was in North America two years ago, and at least two people said to me, ‘the Canadian junior mining market is never coming back’,” Forwood said.

“So that was capitulation, but that was actually music to my ears. I thought, ‘okay, we must be near the bottom here’.”

From February 2025, the market turned around again in both jurisdictions.

“Both markets took off, but the Canadian market did a lot better and caught right up to the Aussie market over that period,” Forwood said.

“But why did the Canadian market do better last year than the Aussie market? I think some of it comes back to the issued share capital.”

Canada also caught up to Australia in 2025 on equity raisings and Forwood said he wouldn’t be surprised if the TSX had outperformed the ASX so far this year.

Out of hibernation

Forwood looked at all the companies with 2026 forecast gold production of 175,000-725,000 ounces, representing 13 TSX miners and 10 ASX companies.

What he discovered surprised him.

In April 2025, enterprise value per production ounce for TSX miners was US$9868 an ounce versus US$6973/oz for the ASX group.

A year later, the TSX average is US$22,291/oz, while the ASX average is just US$12,089/oz.

“The uplift on the TSX has been 2.3 times. On the ASX, it’s only been 1.7 times, so a lot more money, a lot more interest flowing into Canada,” Forwood said.

“And I think that there’s just less shares outstanding and when things boom, it’s the fire hose thing. You’ve just got to try and get as much through a smaller nozzle than the open nozzle in Australia.”

On an EV to resource ounce basis, the TSX group averaged US$395/oz a year ago versus US$252/oz for the ASX. A year later, the TSX averaged US$768/oz, while the ASX group averaged US$320/oz.

“Canada definitely has much higher value than Australia at the moment, and has improved a lot more, up 1.9 times in the last 12 months, versus up 1.3 times in Australia,” Forwood said.

He added that it was a good time for Canadian companies to make scrip acquisitions, while Australians had a lot of cash.

“There’s a lot of pre-development companies in Australia which are trading at 0.1 of their P/NAV or something like that, so you can use your cash and translate a project into a 10-bagger,” he said.

“I think we’re going to see more and more M&A as a result of this cycle.”

So, who wins? The brown bear or the koala?

“I think 2025 was the year when the Canadian bear came out of hibernation, and the fact is that Canadian companies can hibernate a lot better,” Forwood said.

“The koala – it’s not even a bear, it doesn’t hibernate, and that perhaps reflects the activity through the cycle of Aussie explorers in particular.”

While it may be a seller’s market for gold assets, Agnico Eagle Mines (TSX: AEM) has no plans to divest its operations outside Canada.

Agnico’s Canadian portfolio, which includes the country’s two largest gold mines Detour and Canadian Malartic, accounts for 85% of its annual production of 3.3-3.5 million ounces of gold.

The company’s main growth projects, including expansions at its two largest mines and the developments of the Upper Beaver and Hope Bay projects, are all in Canada.

Speaking at the Mining Forum Europe in Zürich on Tuesday, Agnico chief operating officer, Nunavut, Quebec & Europe Dominique Girard said the company often got asked if its Kittilä mine in Finland and Fosterville mine in Australia were still core assets.

Kittilä’s guidance for 2026 is 220,000 ounces of gold, while Fosterville is set to produce 150,000oz.

“We don’t see them as non-core assets, because both of the sites have a long life of mine,” Girard said.

“In fact, in Australia, that’s the longest life of mine that site has ever had.”

Girard added that both sites had exploration upside and were generating around US$1 million of free cashflow per day at current gold prices.

“They are providing value to us, and both places, Kittilä and especially in Australia, it is really difficult to start a new mine and to build a new mine,” he said.

“So, having those assets, it’s an added value, and we keep the regional thinking, ‘okay, how could we build on that at the same place or around-ish, that we could use the synergy we have with the team, the synergy we have with the infrastructure?’” he said.

“So, there’s no plan to let those go for now.”

Pinos Altos in Mexico is the smallest asset in Agnico’s portfolio and is guided to produce 75,000oz of gold this year, though the company also owns 50% of the San Nicolás base metals project in partnership with Teck Resources (TSX: TECK).

“There’s two, three years [of mine life] in front of us” Girard said.

“The team is looking, with the current gold price, could we extend it? Because again, we have the thing built, and we have the team. We’ll see if there’s something.

“But the thinking is to use the workforce and the knowledge to help and to develop San Nicolás, so we’re still into the permitting phase, into the study phase.”

Early options

Earlier this year, Agnico revealed it was open to M&A.

Girard said the company was invested in around 60-70 early-stage projects.

“Some of them are public, some of them are not,” he said.

“And really, that’s the way we’ve been building the company.”

Recent deals include an investment in Cascadia Minerals (TSXV: CAM) and an increase in its stake in Maple Gold Mines (TSXV: MGM), but it also has stakes in companies including Perpetua Resources Corp (TSX: PPTA), Osisko Metals (TSX: OM), Fuerte Metals Corporation (TSXV: FMT), Rupert Resources (TSX: RUP) and Collective Mining (TSX: CNL).

“Our goal by doing that is to have access to the data, having access to the people, being more comfortable with the region, to get the knowledge, that advantage,” Girard said.

“Often the value of the project is well-priced, so you need to see through that. You need to see through the exploration potential, to match the value and to create the value.

“We’re patient so often it could be two years, five years, seven years, working with the junior company to help them to develop the project.

“It’s good for us, but it’s also good for them because we could provide some technical knowledge and help on how to develop the project.”

Girard said it boiled down to two criteria: could the company build many mines in the region? And was the jurisdiction stable?

“So, even though we could build many mines in Africa, we won’t go there,” he said.

A panel discussion during the 2026 Mining Forum Europe in Zürich considered whether mining company boards were too scared to make bold moves.

Perhaps scarred by the memories of the previous cycle, there hasn’t been huge increases in capital expenditure, mergers and acquisition or exploration.

Cupel Advisory Corp’s Neil Adshead said he hadn’t seen any “crazy, head-scratching M&A” in the current cycle.

“What’s strange is that it’s almost like the miners don’t believe in the current gold price,” he said.

“The gold prices they use in the reserve estimates and in their feasibility studies are almost half of what the gold price is.”

Adshead noted there had been rampant cost inflation and a blowout in project permitting timeframes.

“I think that’s one reason, and maybe there’s another reason is that there’s a lot of inertia, maybe in management teams and boards who are sitting on $5, $10, $20 million of paper, and they’re all sitting there with big wins right now,” he said.

“Do they really want to take the risk and put $3-5 billion into a big project somewhere that might pay in 10 years’ time? I think there’s a little bit of that.

“Actually, there’s a bit of inertia in the current management teams that it’s gravy train time right now. They’re all making piles of money. Everyone’s shareholders are happy with them. Why take on the big risk?”

Jefferies global head of equity strategy Chris Wood said most generalist fund managers were completely ignorant about the gold mining sector.

“I would say by the middle of last year, most general fund managers didn’t know what Agnico Eagle was,” he said.

“If they knew about two gold mining stocks globally, they knew Newmont and Barrick, and they’ve obviously been pretty disastrous in recent years, so there was this general desire not to get involved with gold mining stocks.

“Also, there was the memory of the previous cycle, which peaked in 2011 where there was massive capital misallocation.

“Personally, I think it’s great that the big mining companies are not committing to big capex, and that’s exactly what the fund managers think. The fund managers don’t want to see big mining companies commit to aggressive capex.”

Adshead said it was hard to think of a major copper mine being built right now.

“I just think a lot of a lot of boards are sitting there, and they’re kind of scared to spend billions of dollars to build this 0.3-0.4% copper asset, 4000m up in the Andes with a dodgy Peruvian or Chilean government,” he said.

“I just think there’s fear, a bit of scaredness, in the boardrooms, and nobody’s brave and visionary and thinking, ‘I’m going to build the next mine for Rio Tinto’ – I just don’t think the vision is there.

“I think people are very short-term thinking right now from a capital expenditure point of view.”

Wood suggested the lack of large increases in capex meant we hadn’t reached the peak of the cycle.

“I just think we’re in the mid-cycle of an extended correction,” he said.

“The biggest signal that we were going to enter correction is that we didn’t make a new high when this Iran war kicked off, which was a genuine surprise to the market.

“To me, I think the big mining companies are very conscious of that, and they don’t want to blow their credibility because of what happened in the last cycle.”

Exploration

Panel moderator, Global Mining Research’s Tony Robson, said from the presentations he’d seen at the forum, it appeared that companies were spending more on exploration.

But Adshead said the increase in spending didn’t necessarily equate to more exploration.

“I think there’s more spending on exploration because there’s a lot of inflation in the exploration sector,” he said.

“It’s harder to pick up ground, it takes longer to get permits, so you’re just sitting there doing nothing, paying salaries, etc.

“It’s getting very expensive to drill holes. A lot of the targets are getting deeper or more remote, and there’s not a lot of people who have appetite to fund early-stage grassroots exploration, so the cost of capital for those explorers has gone up as well.”

Adshead companies were getting less bang-for-buck on exploration.

“For example, some of these companies might spend $50 million a year, but they spend most of their time doing AI models in the office and shuffling papers,” he said.

“When you see a discovery today, like a really great drill hole, they are super valuable.

“You can spend $20-30 million drilling something, and all of a sudden you get a $2 billion valuation based on that discovery, because they are so rare, so hard to find, and given these current metal prices, if you find a good quality deposit today, you can make 100 times returns.”

Adshead said he’d love to see miners pull back on share buybacks and spend more on exploration.

“Everybody seems kind of comfortable right now, everyone’s happy,” he said.

He added that too many company directors were sitting on millions of dollars’ worth of deferred share units that they only received when they left a company.

“You’re almost incentivising these people to actually walk away from the company, so I just think there’s not enough vision, not much risk there,” he said.

“Probably the average age of the management teams and the boards here are 50s and 60s and they’re all multi, multi-millionaires right now.

“Do they really want to risk that right now? No, they’re happy just to cruise along. Maybe they feel like the top is coming, then they just step off the board and cash their $20 million and away they go.”