Aura Minerals Inc. Common Shares Mining Forum Americas 2026
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As I go through the presentation, I am going to talk a little bit about the past and the future of Aura. Basically, what we have done and we intended to do in terms of creating shareholder value is deliver value by growing the company consistently paying significant dividends. Doing both without stressing our balance sheets, keeping our net debt over EBITDA at very reasonable levels and improving our valuation multiples. You see, that has been our focus in the last five years and is what we expect in the years to come. Just as a way by introduction, we are focused on Latin America. The entire management of the company is from the region. We are coming from three mines in production three years ago, to six mines in production now.
We have four gold mines in production in Brazil, one gold mine in Honduras and one copper mine in Mexico. Our growth has been through either acquiring greenfield projects, building them on time and budgets, putting production, or by acquiring assets that became non-core to larger gold producers and then finding opportunities, turning them around and finding opportunities that maybe the larger companies didn't focus for because it was not priority. This year, we expect to be producing 340,000-390,000 ounces of gold equivalents. Other than those six mines in production, we have other two projects that are going to help us to increase the company and exceed the 600,000 ounces in the medium term. One gold project that is currently in production underground mine in Guatemala and another one called Matupá in Brazil that is ready to build.
We built two mines in the last couple of years in Brazil both on time and budget. Our same management construction team now is in Guatemala and then intends to go to the next projects in the future. Look at our performance in the last couple of years. Since 2018, our production has increased more than 170% by delivering this strategy. You see there is a more detailed production profile from 2023 onwards. You see our production increase has been not substantial. We are not doubling year after year, but has been consistent by max. We are delivering a growth year after a year. 2026 is going to be a new increase in production. In terms of all-in sustaining cash costs, we have been historically very competitive. 2025, we close with all-in at $1,458. We are in the first quartile of the AISC for the gold sector. This year we see an increase.
That is mainly because we made one acquisition, one of the new projects. It is called MSG, Mineração Serra Grande. It was part of AngloGold Ashanti portfolio. We closed that acquisition in December. It is a mine that is requiring a turnaround. This year it is operating above $3,000, but we already expect to see it coming close to $2,000 already from 2027. Excluding that impact, we are still very competitive at 1,600 range in terms of all-in. As a combination of increasing production, more favorable gold prices and costs under control, you see significant improvement in revenues. Our EBITDA coming from $134 million in 2023 to over $800 million in the last 12 months. We have had a good conversion of EBITDA into free cash flow, which has allowed us to invest in what I said at the very beginning, increase our company, pay dividends without stressing our balance sheets.
This is a snapshot looking in the past as well, bringing numbers, this message. In terms of investments, we invested almost $700 million in expansion through acquisitions and mainly building new projects and also allocating capital, extra capital in geology. We have been accelerating since 2022 how much we are putting in geology and exploration to increase our reserves and resources and our reserves at a faster pace than we are depleting. We see that is working. We are seeing increasing in reserves and resources of the company also year after year, despite the increase in production. That is also generating value. At the same time, paying dividends and making buybacks. We, the last four years and a half have distributed more than $440 million in dividends and buybacks.
You can see our dividend yield has been consistently high, has ranged between 4% minimum, 9% at a minimum, but every year has been close to 5%, 6%. At the same time then we are growing our production, we are growing our reserves and resources. We are paying dividends and doing buyback and not stressing our balance sheets. Our net debt over EBITDA remain pretty much under control over all the periods, over this period, never exceeding 0.7 times, now it is 0.2 times. Now looking to some case studies on how we have been able then to do this now. What is the magic then to allocate capital, to grow, to pay dividends and not stress balance sheets? This is pretty much our investment mindset. First, every time that we are going to make new investments, we look for projects not necessarily big.
Actually, if you look into both our projects and our mining operations, they are even considered small for our sector, producing 60,000 ounces, 75,000, 80,000, 90,000 ounces. But usually they deliver a very good return in internal rate of return and short payback. If you are looking Almas is a project that we built in Brazil between 2022 and 2023. Was a very low, very limited CapEx, only $76 million. Now this project has a NPV of close to $1.2 billion. Even when we announced this project, the expected internal rate of return was over 50%, so was already expected to be very high returns. But at the time was small to produce 50,000 ounces per year.
What we do is we like to minimize the CapEx, optimize the returns, minimize the payback, and once it goes in production, then we invest the cash flows to look for the upsides. In Almas, for example, we started with 1.3 million tons capacity installed at the plant. Now this year, we are going to finish with 3 million tons. We are building only 16 months. Borborema, similar story, was second project we built in Brazil. You see was CapEx below $200 million NPV, now close to $1.7 billion. When we announced construction, we had less than 800,000 ounces in proven and probable reserves. Now that number is almost 2 million ounces. So we are investing to unlock value as well, very similar to Almas.
When we will take these two examples, it helps to understand why we can keep increasing and paying dividends and not stress the balance sheets because the CapEx usually are limited, are small. The payback is very short. It allows us when we are going to the next investment already to collect the payback. Now we are going and building our third project called Era Dourada in Guatemala. Also it is bigger in terms of CapEx, but it is going to be a little bit bigger in terms of production, although not huge. USD 380 million CapEx for NPV considering gold prices of $3,200 of USD 1.3 billion. That also a very good return is expected for Era Dourada.
Going forward, as I mentioned, this we looked a little bit what we did in the last five years and then going forward, how we expect to keep delivering shareholder value the same, increase our production with the new projects that we have, keep increasing our reserves and resource. We have almost 600,000 hectares of mineral rights, pretty much underexplored. Geologically speaking, we know roughly 10%-15%, so there is a long way to go. Also keeping increasing the market multiples. We know that companies, as they grow, the size matters in terms of multiples. Majors, larger companies, they have better multiples than mid-tiers or junior companies. So we keep growing. We have inside our portfolio projects that are going to take us to produce at least 600,000 ounces, and we keep looking for acquisition opportunities to take us to produce to be a 1 million producer in the medium term.
This is a plan that we announced last year how to get to the 600,000. This was disclosed to the market by around mid 2025. We are producing 267,000 by 2024. The first two steps are already delivered. We were building Borborema. Now we reached commercial production, finalize the ramp-up. It is fully in production in 2026. MSG, we had not closed acquisition. Acquisition has been closed. Era Dourada now is under construction. Then once that is finalized, we have a project, older project in Brazil called Matupá. Is ready to build, but we do not like to build two projects at the same time in parallel.
When we are in the advanced stage of Era Dourada, we can go to Matupá, and we have internal expansion opportunities in those assets that are showing, like Borborema, like Almas. We keep growing. Then, it is pretty much in-house to get to the 600,000 in the next couple of years. The next step on that staircase, it is, like I said, Era Dourada in terms of we saw robust economics. It is going to add more than 110,000 ounces of production per year. It is in construction. We have more than 350 people working the site. Construction is expected to finalize by end of 2027, so should come early 2028. Besides being an important milestone for us in our growth plan, we consider Era Dourada is going to become one Case study and a benchmark in terms of ESG.
First, 100% of the energy is going to be clean energy. We have a geothermal project that's going to supply energy. In terms of water, in 2025, we spent almost 1,000 hours talking to the communities and analyzing the environment. We saw that there was one big concern and one big issue was the quality of the water. We approved, and it's part of our CapEx and OpEx in our feasibility study, a solution in which by the end of the process, we're going to deliver clean, potable, and drinkable water to the population. It's going to be the first municipality, it's expected to be the first municipality in Guatemala with that level of clean water. Not only we're not going to pollute the water, but we're going to clean the water to a level that they don't have today.
We're very proud and expect it to become a ESG benchmark. Just in terms of conclusion, a growing company, good assets generating strong cash flows with interesting projects and growth ahead of us, paying dividends with still discounted opportunity to close our valuation gap. We have our market cap close to $7 billion. Our cash now, that was the end of Q2. We just raised it to $200 million to help fund our expansion plan. We're fully funded for our expansion. Our main shareholders, we have a controlling shareholder, has 47% of the company and other than very well-known global names like Capital Group, BlackRock, Fidelity, and other reputable investors. With this, end of the presentation. Open to questions. Thank you.
Thanks, Kleber. Any questions from the audience? Oh, there's a question over here.
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