Royal Gold CEO At BoaML 18th Annual Canada Mining Conference (Transcript)

During the year we completed two capital markets transactions and equity placement and a convertible note both of which allowed us to position the company well from a liquidity perspective to continue to find new investments. And in keeping with our history over the past decade, we again increased our dividend. And our current calendar year dividend payout is up over 100% relative to what it was in Calendar 2008.

Now one of the struggles many gold companies have had over the past few years in the inability to outperform the gold price for the ETF. It does us real good to talk about the fact that ETF buyers do not receive dividends and do not benefit from reserve expanses if in fact the share price cannot outperform the gold price. So if we look back from our last fiscal year end, the total return on Royal Gold shares has outperformed the gold price over the last one, three and five year periods.

Now a few of the issues to consider when assessing the quality of our royalty portfolio really tied to operators. Ideally what one wants in a royalty asset, we'd like to see operators that are highly experienced, with sufficient capital to meet construction and operating issues that eventually arise.

Two, we want the assets on which the royalties apply to actually be important to the operators themselves. And three, we want the assets to be low cost producers or at least able to withstand sustained production at a lower commodity price environment.

Now Teck, Gold Corp. and Barrick, we have operators with a combined market capitalization of $180 billion and considerable experience in building and operating mines. These four account for almost 60% of our revenue and they operate 10 of our revenue generators. And although we cannot characterize all of the assets operated by these companies as court east portfolio, the important contributors to our business like Andacollo, Penasquito, Voisey’s Bay are meaningful to each of the operators. And in the case of Alamos and St. Andrew, the underlying properties are really core revenue generators for each of them. And Mulatos is actually one of the lower cost gold producers in the industry.

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