Earnings Labs

Franco-Nevada Corporation (FNV)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Thu, Mar 26, 2015

$230.81

+1.00%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

-3.25%

1 Week

+0.06%

1 Month

+2.72%

vs S&P

-0.28%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning. My name is Sharon and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Franco-Nevada 2014 Results and Investor Day Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Mr. Stefan Axell, you may begin your conference.

Stefan Axell

Analyst

Thank you, operator. We are pleased that you have joined us today either in person here in our boardroom or over the phone for the Franco-Nevada 2014 results and investor day conference call. Accompanying our call today is a presentation which is available on our website at Franco-Nevada.com, where you’ll also find our full financial results as well as a copy of our updated asset handbook. We estimate today’s presentation will be slightly longer than our regular conference call as we will be providing an update on our various business segments. This will be followed by a Q&A for those people here in this conference room as well as those participating over the phone. Before we begin the formal remarks, we would like to remind participants that some of today’s commentary may contain forward-looking information and do refer people to the cautionary note on slide 2 of our presentation. For today’s presentation, our entire executive team is available as well as our management to answer any questions over the phone or here in person. I’ll now turn over to Sandip, CFO of Franco-Nevada, to review our 2014 results.

Sandip Rana

Analyst

Thanks, Stefan. Thank you, everyone, thank you for joining us this morning. As you will have seen from our press release yesterday, the company released the results for the fourth quarter as well as for the full year 2014. Again, strong results across all our key financial metrics. Before I do get into the specific details of performance in 2014, turning to slide 6, you’ll see a chart where we highlight our revenue and our adjusted EBITDA for the last, I guess, seven periods, seven year, which is 2008 to 2014, 2008 being the first year after our IPO. And as you can see, significant growth over this period. Revenue has gone from $151 million to $442 million in 2014, adjusted EBITDA of $127 million in 2008 to $357 million in 2014. So significant growth over this period, the company continues to deliver. Just in 2014, in general, revenue was up 10%, despite a 10% decline in the average gold price for the year, which was $1,266 for the average price and adjusted EBITDA also up 10.7% year over year. We put on this red line, the red line depicts the average gold price for each of those periods. As we all know, in the fall of 2011, we hit $1,900 an ounce of gold, which was the highest, but that carried on into the early part of 2012. So in 2012, the average price was actually $1,669, I believe, with $1,266 in 2014. That’s a 24% decrease in average price over that time frame, yet our revenue has remained fairly stable with a significant increase in 2014. So we continue to grow our revenue and adjusted EBITDA even during a low commodity price environment. Turning to slide 7, just in general, in the mining industry, 2014 was again another…

Paul Brink

Analyst

Thanks, Sandip. Good morning. Our business is investing in deposits with good expansion potential. Our philosophy is pay a good price [indiscernible] but be able to participate in the future exploration success. It’s a very long term investment model. What’s important over the long term obviously is minimizing any exposure to cost inflation and also the potential for any encroachments on the deposits. We try and spend as much of our management time as we can on new investments in growing our business and we try to avoid getting involved in any operations. The application of the royalty and streaming financing model is growing broad over time. As you know, our business is buying third party royalties and we continue to do that. And in most years, we add few royalties to our portfolio. The second stream of growth was in streaming and that’s over the base metals streaming, buying precious metal streams coming out of mostly copper assets for ourselves. But then as the gold markets have turned down, we’ve turned to looking to finance gold companies as well, both through royalties and through streams. And there’s been a number of transactions that we’ve done over the last couple of years. But the latest iteration of the model has been in financing M&A, again that’s both through royalties and streams. Triangle is a good example of that, most recent example last year was us financing Lundin, helping them to acquire the Candelaria mine. Just this week Noront announced it’s got an agreement with Cliffs to buy Cliffs’ chromite assets. Those assets have been put a CCAA process, so it does require court approval for the transaction to close and we expect that to happen sometime in the next month. We are financing that transaction, we’re providing a loan to…

Geoff Waterman

Analyst

Thank you, Paul, and good morning. Turning to slide 22, what we are showing here is how our oil and gas portfolio has performed relative to oil prices. You also see the impact at our Weyburn NRI acquisition in late 2012 has had. And as noted before, we’ve had a very good year in 2014 for the oil and gas portfolio. Not unexpectedly, 2015, expectations aren’t that high. We’ve averaged above $48 WTI through to date and our forecast, our guidance for 2015 on oil and gas is $20 million to $30 million, that’s using a $50 WTI oil price, $7 differential and an $0.80 Canadian dollar. I’ve noted on the bottom of the slide the sensitivities, so a 10% increase in oil price, expecting about 25% change in revenues and for a 10% change in the Canadian dollar, about 6% change in revenues. Slide 23, we’re showing what our expected revenue mix will be in 2015 based on $50 oil price and a $1,200 per ounce gold price. As you can see, precious metals is making up 93% of that revenue mix. And if we go by our 80-20 precious-non precious metals revenue guideline, you can see we do have some opportunities to the oil and gas side. With that I would like to turn it over to Kerry Sparkes, Franco’s Vice President of Geology.

Kerry Sparkes

Analyst

Thank you, Geoff. Good morning everyone. It’s a pleasure to be speaking to you today. For those of you that are in the room, this is our 2015 handbook, hot off the press. It is the fourth consecutive year that we’ve provided the handbook and it’s designed to assist both investors and analysts in their understanding of the business and portfolio assets. The book provides details on individual assets, such as location of projects, associated resources and reserves, royalty equivalent units, oil and gas, and additional corporate information. I encourage you to take a copy when you leave or download it from the website, it is a real resource and has become a mainstay of our business. Moving to slide 26, this slide shows the year over year growth in our gold reserves on properties where we have royalties or streams. These are the operators’ reserves and are not our attributable share, but it does provide a good measure of the overall growth of the portfolio. Despite, I quote, declining gold price environment, we continue to see growth and this is clearly a good measure of the quality of our asset base and our ability to replace declining assets with new acquisitions. The result being a 1.2% increase in gold reserves whereas the majority of the industry is suffering from a decline in reserves. Moving to slide 27, this slide shows the total resources attributable to the companies associated with FNV assets. On a year over year basis, we are now starting to see a decline in all categories. There’s roughly a 6% decline in M&I and a 10% decline in inferred resources and somewhat tempered by the positive impact of our new acquisitions. The reasons are mainly due to a number of factors, including conversion to reserves, cut off…

David Harquail

Analyst

Thank you, Kerry. It’s a pleasure to be hosting investor day and we’re just talking a little before that everybody does an investor day and I think what’s really different about us is this is more of an asset handbook rollout date, we do a lot of work on it and I think we’ll be calling that in the future as it reflects something naturally different about our company. Also, I think what stands out in the presentation today is two things in my mind, one we continue to meet or exceed guidance, great pleasure that we significantly exceeded guidance in 2014. I don’t believe we’ve never met – any year we’ve never met or been short of our guidance. I think on average, we generally exceeded guidance. I am pleased about that. And the second thing is what just Kerry demonstrated, we have good stability in terms of the reserve, ounces associated with our properties and the REUs in our portfolio, despite a very tough gold market in the last three years. So those give me great pleasure. So I’m going to speak about the outlook for the company and of course one of the big drivers for outlook is Cobre Panama. And I was just at site couple of weeks ago and I took my some terrible photos on my cell phone and so what I wanted to do is just show you a few things that are happening at site right now. And what you can see is actually on the first picture is the port, the facility is fully functional now, they’re actually delivering equipment to the port through the ore facilities. They jetty is not in yet for loading concentrates and coal outcome out here, but that’s going to come in shortly. And in terms…

Q - David Haughton

Analyst

Geoff had mentioned in his presentation the scope for additional oil and gas to keep at the 80-20 ratio. What are you seeing the market like at the moment for opportunities for you in that space?

David Harquail

Analyst

It’s a very interesting market, because if you recall, our problem, if you recall early last year as our oil and gas was getting too big and I know we talked to the market we might take some of our non-core assets as we’re very impressed with the success of PrairieSky and the valuations I get. We had a number of non-core shorter duration assets that we thought once the market is willing to pay that, maybe we will – we should just re-optimize our portfolio and get our precious metals percentage back up. Of course, the oil price has now corrected those balances, but we never managed to sell during the declining oil price with non-core assets. But we still believe oil and gas is actually a nice compliment to our portfolio. One of the things we think about is oil and gas division historically has actually been there to pay our overhead, pay our cash taxes. So all of those REUs for gold is essentially our investors get for free. And so we think it’s a wonderful time and I think what happen is the PrairieSky success story, that IPO actually got everybody else to dust off their royalty portfolios, they were all thinking of doing IPO, but I think now what’s happened is not realistic, but those are the first assets they want to sell right now. And so there is actually been a number of practices that have come to market recently, of course that were the first call because it seem to have the biggest check book and we are looking at these assets, we want to stay disciplined and stay within the 20-80 rule, but magically we have some capacity to do some transactions right now. So we are communicating we are interested, but we are still going to be 80% precious metals. Any other questions in the room here? Think about it, what we could do, operator, if you could open it up to anyone on the line there that has questions on the conference call?

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And we have no questions at this time. I turn the call over to the presenters.

David Harquail

Analyst

Thank you very much, operator. So we will take questions right here.

Robert Reynolds

Analyst

On the $300 million to $350 million for Cobre Panama, will that include any catch up payment for spending over $1 billion by First Quantum in 2014?

David Harquail

Analyst

Yes, it would. So we would expect $200 million roughly for catch up payments from once they did reach that threshold above and beyond and we’ve guided $600 million is their spend [indiscernible]. So $120 million for this year’s spending. So between the two, it’s between $300 million to $350 million.

Stephen Walker

Analyst

Just a question on Candelaria, are there any further updates after the press release of last night on the condition of the pit at Candelaria?

Geoff Waterman

Analyst

Stephen, we have had nothing since then, so we just got notice to say they are in a suspended state temporarily and as soon as they can address the issues, they will have the operation.

David Harquail

Analyst

I have to say it’s a bit ironic, the Atacama Desert is the driest place on earth, now the problem is too much water and that Cobre Panama has way too much rain. So we could average out these two projects, it would be wonderful, so a bit ironic.

Farooq Hamed

Analyst

Just wanted to get maybe some more insight into the transition at Palmarejo into Guadalupe I guess into mid 2016 and beyond. What are the ounces – early expectation there, what you see on an annualized basis?

David Harquail

Analyst

I’m going to ask Kerry Sparkes with this property, but just so you remember, our transaction had a minimum 50,000 ounces per year until they paid us 400,000 ounces. We think that’s going to go to about mid 2016 and at that point we’ll hit the 400,000 cap and then it switches over to the Guadalupe operation. And actually I think Kerry can talk about it, we’ve been actually very impressed in terms of the additional resources and drilling that’s been happening at Guadalupe. When we first did our transaction, we estimated what was our return for incremental $22 million, we think it’s going to be a better return than we first estimated. And in terms of the volumes, we’re expecting the second half of 2016, I think it’s on average about 20,000 ounces or GEOs net to us on average for about five years afterwards. So it is quite a step down, but we’ve incorporated it in our outlook. We actually see from 50,000 to about 20,000 on average, plus Palmarejo. So it’s going to become an average asset for us going forward. And I think before some investors don’t know Palmarejo is our biggest cash flow generator, it’s risky, but we fixed that problem.

Don MacLean

Analyst

Maybe Dave and Paul, can you maybe talk in big picture about the strategy of these very large transactions you’ve done? How satisfied are you at this point, judging from the number of pictures you took Dave, you must be pretty happy so far, but maybe talk about as you look at what you’ve accomplished and where it’s going, how is that strategy working out, how frequently we expect to follow that or do you expect to, you combine awful lot of small royalties to that kind of price?

Paul Brink

Analyst

Overall, I’d say our strategy – as you’d see, we’re involved both in very large streaming transactions as well as smaller royalty transactions and we like it that way. In a way, it’s a bit of a barbell approach, the bigger transactions can give us exposure to larger operations, in the case of Cobre Panama, something that will have a lifespan that will be 35 to 50 years, in the case of Candelaria very well proven mine where we get a very stable stream of cash flow that will be in the order of 15, hopefully 20, 25 years. On the other hand, we invest in smaller properties that at the outset don’t have that sort of certainly production or life. But at the end of the day those are the ones that can [indiscernible] and as you well know and the Franco story is be the gold strikes, be in the Detours, hopefully it will be a [indiscernible] where we’ve made investments, very little money down that ultimately end up being in the order of $0.5 billion, or $1 billion worth revenue. So we found that we can get often lot more from smaller investments, but also want to make sure that we deliver to our shareholders a very stable and predictable portfolio. And we can bring some of that with the bigger investments. So as we look forward, we’re open to doing both and in an ideal world, if we’re able to do some of each, we’d be very happy.

David Harquail

Analyst

And I will add to it, we have the discussion, we sit down there and I got – a peer called me just a month ago, since we bought a royalty for $50,000, but my nightmare is we have this debate all the time, we’ve gotten so big now that we wouldn’t buy the next gold strike well, I recognize that opportunity. And that something that at our heart, that’s our souls are still exploration, we just think we have a business model we can make money out of exploration where we are doing it. And so we’ve got, I think we build our port capacity so we can execute in parallel multiple deals. We have a fellow in Australia that’s good in executing transactions, in Toronto we have an oil and gas piece, we have Paul leading essentially the big transactions team and I’m the gig doing all the little small stuff. And so what I want to do is I’ve got a picture of Ed Hart when he was prospecting for the Horn ore body. He has got his eyes out there looking for the El Croc alongside of the river, paddling away and what I want to do is make sure we don’t miss that next big one because we’re so distracted just trying to buy cash flow. And so, we’re adding royalties, I know if you’re noticed on the Ring of Fire not only to begin royalty on the Ring of Fire, we got eight other royalties, they came from [indiscernible]. So I was just talking to Mac and Clarence stream and these other ones, all follow this story and I’ve got a piece of each of those now. And so you’ll see our count now, just gone up by another nine royalties once we close another, and we’ll be up to 168 royalties. Just remember, total mining assets will be up to 265 mining assets, remember when we became public in 2007, we only had a 176 mining assets. I think we’re progressively adding assets, we don’t put out lot of commentary on really small stuff, but I think what we are doing is we are always increasing potential for upsides in the future. I tell you we get our biggest scores out of the small stuff.

David Haughton

Analyst

David, if it’s okay I’ve got two questions on the outlook for 2015, one for Sandip and the other one for Geoff. Sandip, good guidance there on what you expect on the revenue side of things from your gold, can you give us some idea what you expect for depreciation and tax rate in 2015?

Sandip Rana

Analyst

So tax rate, I would expect it to decline just because of Candelaria and we have structured that to Barbados, so I would model 25% to 26% as an effective tax rate. As for depletion, obviously there will be an increase just because of the Candelaria and per ounce. At this stage, I don’t want to give a range, but we did $163 million in 2014. I would see it in excess of $200 million for 2015.

David Haughton

Analyst

And the other one for Geoff, if it’s okay, guiding down on the oil revenue, now obviously part of that is going to be the oil price, but is there any shutting of production that you are seeing or is it a combination of shutting of production and also some more weighting of costs coming through our lower contribution from the NPIs?

Geoff Waterman

Analyst

You’ve got that right. The production, we don’t see any shutting so far and on the NPI and NRI, it’s those costs coming through.

Unverified Analyst

Analyst

[indiscernible] Asset Management. Given that you seem to be obviously very excited about opportunities in oil and gas, I was just wondering if you comment on your views about oil and gas prices where you see the commodity going versus other commodities.

David Harquail

Analyst

We can’t, I guess the hardest part is how you value the assets going longer term. And I think you’ve seen what we’re putting out for five years from now, the $75, kind of thinking is a reasonable longer-term projection if we’re going to have to assess assets. But I think everyone is kind of in an accepting mode now the next few years is going to be no major catalyst for the oil price, that’s reflecting in our guidance for this year. But I can’t offer you any more wisdom, I don’t think Geoff can either in terms of market. We have Derek Evans in our board and also Tom Albanese with Vedanta, and they’re both going through the same issue with their own planning and how do they value that and they have to look at impediments too, with what do you tell your auditors you’re going to say it’s the longer term oil and gas prices do you think and what’s the right valuation for your assets in the longer term. So we had a very good discussion during our audit committee meeting two days ago, and I think they are no closer to any clarity on that subject. So we’re just guessing right now.

Robert Reynolds

Analyst

Just to follow up on that tax question Sandip, did you say 25% to 26%, or?

Sandip Rana

Analyst

Yeah, 25%, 26%, I think our effective tax rate normalized if you back out the impairment for 2014 it was 28%, with Candelaria within the Barbados structure, it should come down a little bit. And would that tax rate approximately the cash tax, cash tax will be much lower. In 2014, our cash taxes were $22 million, but $45 million the year before, we had some refunds last year. I would expect $40 million to $45 million in cash tax for 2015.

Robert Reynolds

Analyst

And then just a question, this might be for Lloyd on the Karma project, could you just talk about the type of security you have in that agreement again, just a refresher?

Lloyd Hong

Analyst

So we have a very full security back for that transaction from the subs all the way down to the asset level, we’ve got share pledges and the natural asset level security. So the asset level security will be in Burkina Faso, so it’d be local governing there and then the change is going to be with the subs in the various jurisdictions there.

David Harquail

Analyst

Delighted with that question, because Lloyd was the most shy of my executives, he didn’t want to participate today, so yes, we got him on the speaker phone today.

Stephen Walker

Analyst

Just on the write-down at the adjustments impairment at Mine Waste Solutions, can you talk a little bit about is that a rand, driven by the stronger rand, driven by operating issues, what was the driver there?

David Harquail

Analyst

Yes, under accounting rules, you have a trigger and so you’ve seen operators take write-downs based upon the decrease in the gold price over the last 2 to 3 years, we don’t take that view because we do have optionality in that the additional ounces found on properties we’re not paying for. So we can always put a multiplier on our NAVs and our book values, the NAVs are higher. With Mine Waste Solutions, because there is a cap of 312,500 that optionality does not exist there. So with the depressed gold price environment that was the trigger for us that we did have to go through and exercise. So it’s steady state, 25,000 roughly per year production GEOs to us. So when you run that out, it just worked out to $26.6 million impairment that we’ll be recording. But operationally, it’s working fine.

Geoff Waterman

Analyst

And if you remember originally that was Gold Wheaton asset, it was only dependent on the First Uranium dump there and I think what we’ve had now is a much more steady operation, because AngloGold is now producing also from their dump, some of them actually is better quality than the First Uranium. And so we’ve had a much more dependable throughput, we’ve been actually pleased, Paul is just visiting there. And I think it was the right call for us, the only way we could actually apply a royalty on Anglo’s dump was with that cap. And I think it’s been the right call for the company.

Anita Soni

Analyst

Question probably for Sandip, on Candelaria, the time lag, how is it a specific amount and would you expect close with the issues with rail?

Sandip Rana

Analyst

So for the six months, our share of production was as I said 36,000 GEOs. We received a portion of that, so anything from say mid November onwards selling to January in terms of ounces. So we perceive those ounces, but then I would expect the same thing at the end of this year, say for mid November, any concentrate shipped we’re not getting it paid, so 2016. As for the rain, as Paul said, we don’t have any insight as to how long it’s going to be shutdown, what’s going to happen.

Anita Soni

Analyst

[indiscernible]

Sandip Rana

Analyst

So the timeframe in terms of from when Lundin records sales and ships to when we get paid is anywhere from 45 days to 60 days.

David Harquail

Analyst

Any other questions? I think just one more, operator, if you could just check again if there’s anybody on the line and otherwise we’ll wrap up our investor day and we’ve done it in just under an hour?

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And we have no questions over the phone line at this time.

David Harquail

Analyst

Thank you, operator. So I think last call, any questions in this room? Otherwise, what I would like to do is don’t forget your asset handbooks. Of course, Stefan has lost a lot of sleep in the last two weeks to try to put this out on a timely basis for you. And if anyone on the line, please just email us at info@franco-nevada.com and we’ll send you, be happy to post a copy to you. We’ll be releasing our first quarter results after the market close on May 6 as well as hosting our annual general meeting, so come out and vote for Catharine, the new director. And we look forward to seeing you there. Thank you. Please come and join us for some refreshments.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.