Wheaton Precious Metals Corp. Common Stock Mining Forum Americas 2026

Sure. Thanks, Matt. Yes, I think the important thing to note is, I have been there for 15 years and helped build, along with the rest of the senior management team, the team that we have in place. We are now up to actually 48 people. We have added three people, all on the technical side, within the last month, that we have been looking for quite some time. The right people, not just any people. That is because there is a significant amount of opportunities to look at. It is probably double right now what we typically look at. Typically, we are at somewhere around 12 to 15 opportunities. We are probably closer to 20, 25 opportunities that we are looking at any given point in time right now. The team itself, it is a very well-run organization that hires high performers that know what they have to do and do it.

There is not a lot of oversight required. Obviously, I ran the corporate development team before stepping in as President and CEO of the company, and I am still staying very involved in corporate development and ensuring that we continue along the same path.

Sure. Our philosophy within Wheaton is to actually acquire the highest quality, lowest cost, longest life, in safe jurisdictions with strong partners. That has always been our strategy. What we are trying to do is create the foundation stock in any portfolio that provides the lowest risk in the entire precious metals space. I can tell you, when we are actually looking at a new opportunity, we start from the technical side. That is why the technical team is probably almost a third, if not slightly higher than that of our company. We take the entire drill hole database. We rebuild it. We come up with our own reserves and resources. We do the same thing on the engineering, using various benchmarking methods, et cetera. Then we vet that against the existing technical reports. What is important is that is just step one.

And just to figure out if we actually believe in the technical report and the quality and what they're planning on doing. The next step is we sit back and we say to ourselves, "What is the opportunity here? Is there an opportunity for expansions in throughput, grades, recoveries, improvements in efficiencies? Is there good exploration upside?" We do enter into life of mine agreements, so that's incredibly important to us as well. All that plays a significant portion of our evaluation. So once the technical team is done and the social science of it is done, looking at the communities and everything around it, the financial team takes over. They do their analysis as well, and the legal team steps in and tries to structure it in the most efficient way to provide our shareholders with the best security and the best structure that we can get.

Sure. We have had an IRR over the last 20 years of somewhere close to 20%. The ROIC that you mentioned is also close to 20% at this point in time. What's important in how we structure these transactions is we don't put up a lot of the capital until we're very, very close to actually construction. So the more de-risked the project is, that's when we feel comfortable putting up a lot of capital. Often what we do is we'll put up, let's say, 10% of the stream value up front to allow them to advance it through to the construction stage and the permitting stage. So when we put our capital in, it's the most de-risked amount of capital, and that immediately generates us cash flows in a much shorter timeframe. So that's one of the reasons why our return has actually been so strong.