Sandstorm Gold – Comprehensive Introduction To A Diversified Mid-Tier Precious Metals Royalty Company
Kim Bergen, Vice President of Capital Markets for Sandstorm Gold (TSX: SSL) (NYSE: SAND), joins me for a comprehensive introduction to this mid-tier precious metals royalty company; diversified across 250 royalties, 40 producing assets, exploration optionality, different jurisdictions, and a leading cost profile from producing royalty partners.
This is wide-ranging discussion that gets into the value proposition and key attributes of Sandstorm Gold within it’s peer group of royalty companies. We spend some time unpacking key transformative acquisition in 2022 of both Nomad Royalty Company and BaseCore Metals Royalty Package (from Glencore), and how that extended the average mine life length in the Company’s royalty portfolio, and brought in more senior operating partners and development-stage companies moving towards production in the next 2 years. Additionally, Kim unpacked the key Hod Madden royalty asset, and how the terms on the gold stream have changed over time, including the sale of the 30% interest in the project to Horizon Copper Corp.
We touch upon the exploration upside across the portfolio with an annual average of 650,000 meters drilled on projects held by royalty partners from 2013 to 2022, and around 340,000 meters of drilling completed in 2022 on producing properties alone. We also dig deeper into the different ways the company is diversified across operators, jurisdictions, and cost profiles.
Wrapping up Kim unpacks the backgrounds of some key members of the management team and board, the key stakeholders in Sandstorm Gold, the share structure, the initiative to pay down more debt and possibly buy back some shares due to the discount to Net Asset Value being seen in their valuation at present, and key catalysts for the next 12-24 months for investors to watch for.
If you have any questions for Kim regarding Sandstorm Gold, then please email me at Shad@kereport.com.
- In full disclosure, Shad is a shareholder of Sandstorm Gold at the time of this recording.
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If Sandstorm is needing/wanting to market themselves thru this platform they must be struggling, or maybe it’s a sign as to how far things have fallen in the Gold space? No offense to the website, but this used to be a “darling” in the Streaming/Royalty space, not a small explorer/developer looking for some love.
Hi Nawanda. I actually reached out to Sandstorm and then talked to Kim at the VRIC show about having them on the show, since I’m a personal investor in their company, and have a passion for the royalty companies in general.
Additionally, I’m not sure why it would be a surprise that we’d want to have them on the KER, or why they’d want to appear on our show, despite their larger size and market cap as a company. (?) We don’t just talk to smaller explorers or developers looking for love. We’ve had on dozens of gold, silver, and base metals producers and a large mix of royalty companies.
Keep in mind, we’ve had Triple Flag on the show that has double the market cap of Sandstorm, as well as most of the other mid-tier and junior royalty companies like Metalla, EMX Royalty, Elemental Altus, Vox, Empress, Electric Royalties, and back before they were acquired by Sandstorm — Nomad a number of times. Also before Triple Flag acquired Maverix we had them on quite a bit too.
Our show is one of the few that really gives royalty companies some airtime to unpack their value proposition, and the prior interviews have tracked really well on the KER. The recent EMX interview, and also this interview with Kim from Sandstorm, are some of the most viewed company interviews over on our YouTube channel, so clearly there is an investor appetite for the royalty companies and on our platform.
well put, your explanation makes sense.
Thanks for that additional feedback Nawanda. Much appreciated.
Here we go again Argonaut Gold is being taken to the woodshed and spanked this morning, it is now down to 23 cents CDN, a drop of over 36%. With over one billion shares outstanding they will probably need to do a reverse split of 10:1 to maintain there TSX listing, these markets are forcing a lot of good companies to participate in share consolidations in order to keep the company profitable for institutional investors, and to keep their operations viable for financings. DT
I guess the market (or maybe a large institutional fund or something) didn’t like the (AR) operations update today. I’ve not dug into the update too deeply yet, as it’s been a very busy day.
However, surely the value of Argonaut Gold didn’t suddenly become 34% less valuable in one day, like the shareprice action and drop in market cap we just saw. This has me very interested in adding more to my Argonaut position this week, and I’ll like put out something today on my Substack channel with regards to this fishing line sell-off. These are the kinds of inefficient markets with regards to resource stocks that can be exploited for those with the willingness to accumulate into nonsensical valuations during periods of negative sentiment.
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(AR) Argonaut Gold Announces 2024 Guidance and Provides Operational Update
26 Feb 2024
https://ceo.ca/@newswire/argonaut-gold-announces-2024-guidance-and-provides
The problem is not with Argonaut the problem is with the state of the economy, it is natural for investors to look at the company, but the big picture is the economy is so bad that people aren’t buying, they can’t afford to buy. Where on earth was the torrent of selling orders coming from.
It was the dumping on the market of millions of shares held in the name of miserable traders whose margins are exhausted or about to be exhausted. DT
Hi DT. I think in addition to the state of the economy points you made… with Argonaut specifically, I think the recent fishing line selloff may have been an over-reaction to these lines in the recent presser:
“While we believe the block model properly estimates the grade of the ore, the mine site is experiencing higher dilution rates than anticipated in the Technical Report due to challenges with selectively mining the high-grade parts of the ore body. As a result of the higher dilution than previously modeled in the high-grade areas of the deposit, the average grade to the mill is expected to be approximately 5 to 10% lower than in the Technical Report over the next 2 to 3 years…”
“…We have learned that selectively mining the high-grade portion of the deposit to the extent predicted in the Technical Report, in the initial three years, may not be achievable….”
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So while there are positive lines right after that, the market is in the mood to sell first and ask questions later.
In that same statement it said:
” life-of-mine grades and ounces are not expected to be impacted. The Company expects to have an updated technical report with the latest findings filed in the second half of 2024.”
“In 2024, lower grades due to pit sequencing coupled with lower mining and processing rates in the first half of the year are expected to be offset by higher mill throughput in the second half of the year following the completion of optimization work underway in the first half of the year and improvements in mill availability,”
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So, while one can understand the frustration that ramping up production at Magino will take longer, not have quite as high of grade due to dilution around the selective mining, and thus the economics may not be as robust. Still, does the grade being lower by 5%-10% from just Magino, really mean the company deserves a 34% haircut today? Probably not… but that’s the market we are in.
Most recent Corporate Presentation for Sandstorm Gold:
https://www.sandstormgold.com/wp-content/downloads/Sandstorm-Presentation.pdf