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Franco-Nevada Corporation

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September 16, 2024 at 2:20 PM (MDT)|Broadmoor Hotel & Resort

Paul Brink

Director and President & Chief Executive Officer

Paul Brink is President & CEO and a director of Franco-Nevada. Prior to his appointment as CEO, Mr. Brink served as President & Chief Operating Officer of Franco-Nevada from May 2018 to May 2020. He has been with Franco-Nevada since its initial public offering in 2007 and successfully led its business development activities as SVP, Business Development from 2008 until his promotion to President & Chief Operating Officer in 2018. Mr. Brink is active with a number of not-for-profit organizations. He previously had roles in corporate development at Newmont, investment banking at BMO Nesbitt Burns and project financing at UBS. Mr. Brink holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Witwatersrand and a Master’s degree in Management Studies from Oxford University.

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Hi, Paul, how are you doing? Great, good to see you. Good to see you. So, next we have Paul Brink, President and CEO of Franco-Nevada. I think you just joined me for a fireside chat, right Paul. Perfect. So I don't know if you were in the room but you know, earlier on, I think triple flag talked about big three royalty companies and that royal gold was gracious enough and said maybe not big three big two, so big two royalty companies and we're here. And so, you know, from that perspective, as well, the bell weathers of the industry, maybe if you can give us some general comments in terms of the opportunity that you're seeing in the industry, some of the key risk you're seeing in the industry. And how do you see gold and commodity prices near term and also longer term as well. Paul: Sure, then maybe start with gold price, good choice. You know, I think the gold market has fundamentally shifted over the last two years and the shift is the geopolitics and it's the China and the bricks and the build up of that trading block and that trading block seeing what happened with Russia and the US dollar and being cut out of the financial system, I think that's a fundamental change that is going to be a tailwind for the gold price for more than a decade. China topped out about 1.3 trillion in US dollars in their reserves. The last I saw they were down below 800,000 or 900,000 million. I know they've paused currently. I think they'll continue. But there's a whole set of countries within the BRICS universe that are following that same strategy. And I think that is gonna be a very long term ongoing process. Which is why gold is dislocated from the usual drivers, which we see which has been the US financial market drivers that are related to US dollar strength, to inflation rates to real yields. I think we've dislocated from that, that will move the gold price up and down in the short term. But I think over the long term, it's that shift in geopolitics, which is, what you know, when we make investments that we expect will play out over decades, that will make a real difference. In terms of the deal environment, it is more active now. You know if there's a single thing that's driving that I think it's been higher rates. It just means the cost of capital that operators can get from the streaming industry is the most attractive cost of capital. They can see in terms of the individual deals, though, the the dynamics that drive those individual deals all differ. But suffice to say there's been a good amount of product this year, there's a good amount of product in the market. I'm confident there'll be more stream deals through the back end of the year and I think that makes for a good environment for the streaming companies. In terms of competition, it's always a matter of supply and demand if you don't have enough deal product and you got too many people chasing it. I don't think that's the environment today. I think there's quite a bit of product out there. So, I think it's a very rational market at the moment. Hey, you don't see any of those potential tailwinds reversing as you talked about. Well, the key drivers of deals was rates being high and we know that they're coming down. Well, the key drivers in the past is when gold prices might be more moderate producer expectations might be more moderate, but gold prices as you talked about Paul very robust. So you don't see those two components impacting your opportunity set. I think the only certainty is things will change. They always do and that's why we run our business the way we do. You don't know, what the environment will hold. We always assume it's gonna be cyclical commodity markets and and cyclical financing markets. The beauty of it is with our model though is that you know as we go in now gold prices are running hard. We've got such a deep portfolio. We always say to ourselves, we don't need to put our foot on the gas when prices are high. We're gonna get the growth organically. Operators will expand their projects. We got some of those to come, developers will have the capital to build new mines, explorations will be able to drill, we'll get organic growth. The second part of that is, that's why we always like having a bit of diversification in the business is if things get to high in the gold market, we're able to turn to other sectors. And if there are sectors that are more depressed, we can expose our shareholders to that same resource optionality. Be a bit more choosy about what commodities we find. We've been able to grow the business more profitably by having more options. Yeah, I do believe you Paul because you've actually been very active, fairly active in the past month, two months. I would point to your acquisition of Yanacocha and Cascabel. And so maybe if you can talk about those two in terms of timing and then more specifically on Yanacocha, in terms of potential growth here, I'm not neglecting Cascabel, but I have a separate question for that later on. All right. Well let's start with Yanacocha here. As many of you know the Franco team spent a lot of time at Newmont, when Newmont owned the royalty portfolio and got very familiar with the Yanacocha asset. It's one of the biggest Golden mines globally. There's 50 million ounces that have been produced from the oxides. There's at least another 50 million ounces on that property to come. The next stage is the Sulfide project. Newmont started on the build of that project. They've ordered long lead time items. They've done the underground development that they need to get to the underground portions of that ore body that they put it on hold while they're bedding down the Newcrest. The Newcrest assets, we're confident they go ahead with that sulfides project before too long. That the project on its own has in the order of 10 million gold equivalent ounces contained what a team liked the most being at the property was the exploration potential just for the sulfides themselves. There's a lot of drill indicated material just needs more drilling to move it into a resource category. We think the Sulfides Project will run for many decades. The icing on the cake on that deal is potentially Conga. Conga itself is, you know, currently 20 million ounces of resource gold equivalent, you might try to permit it or move it forward. A number of years back, They had community opposition, they stepped back from it. They have a very experienced crew that are now trying to redevelop support for that project. We understand it's going well. You know, even if it doesn't happen, we'll do very well just on the Sulfides. If Conga ever did happen, it would be an absolute home run. So it sounds like when you evaluated the deal, you know, you certainly factored into current operations at Yanacocha. You certainly factored in the potential upside here at sulfides, but not maybe Conga. Is that how we consider? We consider it all upside if it happens, it's all upside. And then maybe turning to Cascabel about what's the potential upside here? I don't think you were in the room earlier, but when I asked Jason from Osisko Gold Royalties in terms of syndication, he was very excited. He talked about some of the positives. Do you share in those positives? And maybe can you talk about the potential of further syndications because you've syndicated now with Osisko Gold Royalties and previous to that Sandstorm Gold. So again, the upside here at Casacabel and syndication. Sure, maybe I'll start with syndication. We're trying to build a business that's a low-risk way for people to invest in gold exploration success. So by that virtue, the more diversified you are the better, you know as we saw, our largest core asset Cobre Panama an absolutely fantastic asset, but it was 20% of our NAV, when it stops producing that, that's a big dent in the side of the vehicle. So, we've always been open to syndication. We remain open to it. More often, it's just difficult, it's difficult to do from an operator perspective that they want to run as competitive process. They can, most often an operator says we don't want to see any syndication, everybody bids separately once you've actually done a deal and it's much harder to syndicate it. So open to doing more. But in this case, both ourselves and Osisko have had a relationship with the company. We'd written previous royalties ready from the outset. The company came to us and said we want to do this financing. Let's all work together to get it done. That's how it came together in terms of the upside on the asset. It is Cascabel, I think it's going to be one of the next generation of big copper deposits. It's a very attractive blockade target. It's in Ecuador, companies put out the pre-feasibility study is just on the high grade core of that ore body, it's 500 million tons of 1% copper equivalent. Our financing there is $525 million, but if you take the gold that we'd have a share in at today's gold price, there's about $2 billion of value that we would capture just in the first phase of the ore body. The total resource is 3 billion tons. There's four times as much gold in that as in the original start. So we can make many quant, you know if and when that gets developed over time, you know, this can be close to a 10 bagger for us. Great. And you know, looking at these two acquisitions on paper, it seems like there's a lot of differences, one's a long-standing producer, the other one is you know, undeveloped asset, but taking a step back, there are actually more similarities to it than we believe than we can see on paper. That's number one, number two, though, do those similarities potentially speak to the potential opportunities out there? You know, as we build the portfolio, the best assets to invest in are those that are cash flowing or close to cash flow? But we're also, you know, with the asset that we got, we know we're in business 50-70 years already, we've got a low cost of capital. So we think of it as a bit of a competitive advantage that we can do some deals that are longer dated. We've got the latitude to wait and let those options mature and you can create often more value doing it that way. So happy to do some cash flowing deals some longer term options. The similarity is all bodies and our experience has been, you know, investing in all bodies. We're prepared to pay a very fulsome price for what's there today. Where we get our upside as if indeed, that all body gets bigger. And what we've learned over time is that when you've got a huge endowment to start with the chances that you're gonna find more is the best. And so where we can find these terrific all bodies like Yanacocha like Cascabel, you know, we know the odds that we're going to find even more over time is that much higher. And Paul, I'm glad you brought up Cobre Panama. So now it's fair game on Cobre Panama. The new government now has there's a new government, new president, they've been sworn in July. Could you provide us to the extent that you can some updates on Cobre Panama, how it pertains to your stream and what that could mean the was a big setback last October when the new tax agreement was agreed, announced big public protests and the net result of which the government and the Supreme Court forced the shutdown of the mine had elections in May. That was the government elections in May, new government came in, it's headed up by President Molino. He in the first week of his presidency said that he was open to renegotiation of the mine. So, that was the first positive in terms of his agenda. The first thing on his agenda is pension reform. So that's what he is tackling the back end of this year. He said the next item that he wants to tackle is the mine. So start of next year is when we'd hope that those conversations would take place. I'd say the most positive thing is the practical steps that he's taking to get there, you know, and first a reminder it wasn't that the government didn't want the mine that the Cortez government negotiated a contract. You know, I believe they thought that in announcing that contract, that's what would help them win the next election. It was the, you know, how that contract was perceived politically and by the population, that's the issue. So, I actually think the easy part, it will be renegotiating a deal with the government or the more achievable part, the harder part is making sure that when you announce that new deal, that it's politically popular. One of the big issues when they had the protest was, people said it's a big mine, it's doing a huge amount of environmental damage. We just don't want that in country a lot of misinformation there. So the practical step they're taking, they're putting together an international tribunal which will do a very fulsome environmental audit of the mine. You know, I believe that they'll at the back end of that, be able to present to the people of Panama to say we've checked it out. This is a very well run operation. There is minimal, no environmental impact to set the stage that they can get a new deal approved. Great. Any questions coming from the audience, Paul, we started off with gold, we focused on gold, but Franco-Nevada's heritage also has energy. So maybe if we can turn over to energy just a little bit. Number one, can you remind us what's the composition right now in terms of the different metals and, and energy and, and others in your portfolio. In terms of percentages, we'll be running a bit more than 75% precious metals. We're about 15% energy and then the the balance is made up with iron ore and a little bit of copper. And are you happy with it? You know, the way we look at the business is we, we're trying to be a precious metal stock. So long as they are good deals to do in the precious metal sector, we'll do as much as we can. But as I said earlier, we're investing in cyclical markets. The reason we have the diversified is, is when you can't do good deals in precious metal that you got other options to grow more profitably. You know, a lot of the history of the company, Seymour Schulich was an oil and gas guy. So when, when it came to those times, he could easily turn to the oil and gas space. It's, it's a great space just because it's so big. There's so many players, there's so many players. If there's a downturn in oil and gas, you can turn to the industry pretty quickly and find some good transactions. So it's always worked well for us and we've got an expertise in it, but the model plays out equally as well with other commodities and, and you know, in particular for gold, I mean, gold is fantastic for its optionality. The metal endowment in the ground is not that much. It means it's very expensive to drill out your deposits. You rarely drill more than 10-15 years at a time. And then over time that the old body reveals itself, we found with other commodities, it's things like iron ore or potentially potash copper, they're much greater endowments, you can very easily drill out 50-70 years of reserves. So we like to have some of those in the portfolio because it creates that foundation where we can say, hey, it's a business. We know we're in business for that amount of time. It allows us to buy some of those gold options that will take time to mature to actually find the their nice book ends in the portfolio. Of course, as you mentioned during the Q2 2024 earnings call, you're now trending to the lower end of 2024 production sales guidance. How much of that is due to lower iron ore and energy prices? And can you conversely touch on the performance of the core precious metals portfolio? What can we expect for the second half more specifically? Can you touch on new start ups including Greenstone TZ Solares Norte? We'll speak about this year in the guidance and then we can speak about the five year outlook. Main impacts of this year were 22 of our biggest assets, Candelaria and Anpaccay which are super assets been some of our best acquisitions that form our expectations and actually you know, both of which have got forward projects that are very exciting. So super assets, unfortunately, in Q2 both of them had a down quarter.  At Candelaria it was the pit was mining into an area where they had some underground voids. So they had to change the mine plan around that so that blew up their quarter. At Antapaccay, they had heavy rainfall, it caused some pit instability. So they had to mine around that. Both of them short term impacts, no implications on the longer term mine plan. So those continue to be great assets is just a timing impact for the quarter. The second impact is yes on the other commodities, you know, energy prices, iron ore prices, not that much different from what we used in our deck at the start of the year. Just a little bit low. Really the difference just being gold prices are that much higher. So if you convert those other commodities into GEOs, you get a lower number but it's more just that the gold price is done as well. To wrap it up Franco-Nevada has now built up a cash balance of $1.4 billion with an additional $1 billion in available capital in your credit facility. Can you talk about your strong balance sheet and how that could be used to generate investor value in the current environment? In terms of the way that we think about the balance sheet and you know, some people say, oh, Franco, you don't like debt. It's not that we don't like debt. It's just that we want to maximize the amount of capital that we got available at any point in time. When, when you have a downturn, when the industry is short of capital, that's where we really want to get busy. And so always maximizing our options. We feel is the best approach in terms of what we can see ahead of us. I think we can easily put that capital to work. So I don't see any change in our capital allocation strategy. You know, much as you would have heard from Bill, number one is do deals. That's where we add the greatest value and have been able to do over time. The second is pay dividends and where our record is 17 years of successive dividend increases. Again, we want to be a low-risk way for people to invest. We want to know, I want our investors to know that regardless of what happens in the gold market, we'll be in a position to sustain the dividend. And so long as we can keep growing the business that we will increase the dividend and our board will love to be in that position for the next 30 years. Great. Thank you, Paul.


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