Metals & mining investors with an aversion to risk often look to the royalty business model as a perfect hedge.
Vox Royalty Corp. (VOX) (
TSX-V.VOX,
OTCQX: VOXCF,
Forum) is very unique amongst the mining royalty and streaming companies.
VOX's portfolio is focused on precious metals royalties, seeking out the very best royalties and purchase agreements over development-stage assets, advanced stage development projects, or operating mines. Vox Royalty has a portfolio of over 50 royalties and streams across the globe.
In this intriguing video Q&A, Stockhouse Media’s Dave Jackson was joined by the Vox Royalty Corp’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Kyle Floyd, to introduce his company to our investor audience.
(CLICK IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO)
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
SH: To start off with, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the history of the company?
KF: Vox Royalty Corp, I founded this company almost 10 years ago, prior to that I ran the mining investment banking division for a very prominent firm and built Vox to solve the problem on the mind of a lot of investors', which is how do I solve for inflation? How do I get commodity exposure? How do I also solve for the myriad of geopolitical issues that are developing as well and what investments should I be making or considering that help protect me and also present value and growth opportunities in this very complex market that we live in today and so I was always looking to help solve this problem and I believe that third party royalties and the royalty model in and of itself when done right, solves a lot of these issues for investors.
I created this business to focus on where we could find the best value for investors, simplify the business, have a team that was really technical experts solving for a lot of the risks at the front end and offering investors exposure to commodities without the inflation risk because the inflation risk that we all face today, mining companies also face those. We've been able to really strip that inflation risk out of the business and offer very leveraged opportunity to precious metals and so that's what our business is at the end of the day. We've created an opportunity for investors to participate in what many investors believe is a bull cycle in commodities without the inflation input costs really deteriorating the earnings capability of the business. So that's what Vox is. I started building this company almost a decade ago to achieve what is achieving now for investors.
SH: Can you update our investor audience and your Vox Royalty shareholders on any new company developments, especially in the wake of COVID-19 and the Omicron variant?
KF: Obviously COVID has really imparted some challenges on the markets all the way from consumers to large companies and everything in between. The reality is COVID and what I started talking about almost two years ago is we really were dealing with the onset of the pandemic is COVID was going to snarl supply chains and create inflation and honestly also create geopolitical uncertainty. It's done all three of those things. Vox from a business standpoint really is well positioned to lever what is essentially risks and challenges in the market and it's in a lot of ways been a boon to our business and so for example, supply chain risks have really increased commodity prices. We are very exposed to increases in precious metals and let's call it base and battery metals that are really experiencing a significant increase in price overall. So we get the benefit of that.
Inflation is really driving investor interest in commodities as well. Investors are looking for that hedge of an asset class that's to increase, COVID has had a very significant impact on that and then also, I believe COVID has really impacted the geopolitical uncertainty, where do you make investments and what types of companies and Vox has over 80% of our assets are in tier one mining jurisdictions, mainly being the US, Canada, and Australia. We've created a business that while COVID has been very challenging in many respects and we're sympathetic to that from a pure business standpoint. We were very well positioned to capitalize on some of the changes that the market's experience and it really positions our business well, both as it has over the last two years and obviously looking into the future.
SH: You just recently reported record preliminary 2021 revenue and a corporate update. Can you expand on some of the numbers and news for our investor audience?
KF: This is really significant and for a lot of the investors are just now learning about Vox, we created a company where we find really good value on royalties that carry immense value in the market, especially in a portfolio of royalties like Vox, that portfolio concept of royalties is hugely powerful for investors in terms of creating value, when we find good value, we bring that particular royalty into the portfolio and the value that's manifested for shareholders. We have focused on finding pre-revenue royalties, that's where we find the best value. In 2020 we had one producing royalty. Just recently we announced that we have five producing royalties. That growth is almost unheard of in the industry and so that's resulted guidance for 2021 of $1.7 to $2.5 million Canadian in top line revenue. Mid last year, we were able to double that revenue guidance and then we were able to formally announce recently that we came in at the higher end of that guidance between $4 and $5 million Canadian in revenue for the year.
Being able to double revenue guidance, being able to come in at the up end of the guidance was very, very significant. Also within that news release we announced that we are pursuing a NASDAQ listing and expect that to be accomplished for our shareholders, which will significantly increase the liquidity and for comparable companies that have achieved the same listing there's absolutely been a positive correlation between their liquidity and their stock price and us being what we believe is at the undervalued side of the comparable companies in the marketplace. We believe this is going to help us close that gap in relative valuation as well.
SH: In the same news release you also announced that the company has applied for a Nasdaq listing. This is a big move!
KF: As we just talked about Dave, I think the NASDAQ opens us up to an audience that really is looking for the solution that Vox provides, which is what do I do in the current economic backdrop, rising inflation, rising commodity prices and a lot of geopolitical uncertainty. I think we present that answer and having that NASDAQ listing is really opening the door for a lot of investors, mainly in the US that find it more difficult to buy Vox stock with our current exchange and so we believe that's going to solve that problem.
SH: You’ve also just provided a detailed development and exploration update with your royalty operating partners. This may be news to many investors. Can you unpack the benefits of it?
KF: Within this news release, we have new drilling being done on our assets, new engineering studies being commenced on our assets. Instead of going one by one and explaining to investors what all of this news means I'll talk about in totality, what's happening is our portfolio is increasing in value every single day with dollars spent by the operating companies, which we're very grateful for. They're doing the hard work and the work that needs to be done for us to continue living the lives that we are, which is highly reliant on metals but they're spending in some cases really in totality, across our portfolio, there's billions of dollars being spent right now advancing the projects that we have royalties on out of note for no cost of our interests and this is really important for investors to understand our interests are undiluted and their top line interests.
When we don't contribute capital, our royalty interest is not diluted. So if you went and bought a share in a mining company, they would inevitably go raise capital. Usually that's the way it's done equity and they would dilute your interest in that future cash. Our Royal interest is not diluted when they go and they continue to invest in these projects and either bring them into production, increase production or increase development and so that's a huge point for investors to understand. The second point is because it's top line, we're taking a percentage of the top line revenues, the higher cost inputs that are driven by diesel costs, employee cost, infrastructure costs, you name it cost, the input cost to produce an ounce of gold or a ton of iron or whatever the case may be is going up immensely. We're not exposed to that because we're at the top line.
So that is not eating away our margin as a royalty company. So you get the benefits of that top line growth at top line exposure that's undiluted billions of dollars being spent, hundreds of thousands of meters being drilled, no cost to Vox and then that earnings power, that revenue power is not eaten away by rising inflation. So that's why we're so excited about the position that, and the opportunity that we present to investors to benefit from inflation, benefit from rising commodity prices, with a lot less of the risk that those entail.
SH: The Company looks set for strong growth in 2022. How are you placed to expand to meet demand?
KF: Something really unique Dave about our business model is that in 2019 and we were working with this asset, which was the largest in what we purchased in 2019 was the largest proprietary royalty database of hard rock mining royalties in the world. We started working with that in 2018 and when we formally bought it in 2019, we've led the entire royalty market in growth. We have been able to buy royalties in interesting bilateral transactions, us buying from eclectic holders of third-party royalties. I'll give you a couple examples of those. There was a family of ranchers that wanted liquidity and wanted to sell royalty that they had on a near term development stage asset called railroad opinion that's operated by Gold Center Ventures. We bought royalties from prospectors royalties, from telecommunications companies. This eclectic group of holders of third-party royalties is really underpinned by this database that we purchased back in 2019.
That database gives us what we believe And I think it's pretty objective at this stage, the widest slate of opportunities to consider purchasing and allows us to really find the best value in the industry in terms of these royalty opportunities. So our business development pipeline, our ability to continue finding great value for our investors on really exciting projects that our technical team of mining edges and geologists have found very good value and understand very well that continues to lead the industry and pretty much every capacity And so as you look at our growth and how we're positioned for this year and the years ahead it's extremely strong.
SH: For company shareholders and potential investors, what kind of future development and progress can we expect at your marquis projects?
KF: Well, one of the big ones that we like to bring to investors attention is we bought a royalty interest over what is going to be the largest heap leach project in all of Australia. So it's called Janet Ivy when we bought this royalty pre going back into production and it's midstream right now on what is almost a 400 million capital expenditure. So this exemplifies everything that our investors are looking for and that we believe we present. So we bought this for very good value for where it's at that point in time, when you factor in that it's going to become the large, just heap leach project in all Australia. This royalty increases in value immensely for the business and our shareholders and so we bought it pre that announcement and that understanding really being known about in the market. So that's presented great value. That's going to be a very significant contributor to us.
We recently had a project come online. It was the highest-grade open pit in all west Africa. That's recently come online and start producing revenue for us and then we have a host of projects coming on this year. We expect to have two to three more producing assets. So really growth in all those key, really fundamental easy for investors to understand kind of metrics but then we expect over 200,000 meters of drilling being done on our portfolio of projects that we have royalties over. We expect billions of dollars of capital to be spent over these projects. So everything from exploration stage to production stage is really exciting right now for our Vox shareholders and that the business is very well positioned to grow. We could put no more money into new royalties and we expect the value of our business and of our royalties to continue to accelerate.
SH: What separates Vox from the competition and makes your business model unique?
KF: Yeah, it's a great question Dave. Our business model is unique in that we have an ability to find third party royalties others can’t underpinned by our intellectual property advantage, which is really unmatched in the industry and so that's been a huge underpinning of our success. The other is just really how our business is set up to capitalize on that. We have a team of technical experts in the frontline of our business. There are other royalty companies out there. There's some majors like Franco-Nevada, who's a $30 billion company and done tremendously well for their shareholders. A lot of our business has modeled after that. However, with some nuances that we think allow Vox to find deeper better value systematically across the world, that database is part of it. It's our technical team at the front lines doing the hard work. So investors don't have to, you don't have to be a mining engineer. You don't have to be a geologist. You don't have to be investing in the space for 30 years.
Our team's doing that hard work to find the best assets that the best royalties is over them and then we've been able through being in the business for 10 years, transacting on over a billion and a half dollars in royalties as a team, we've been able to connect the dots from understanding a royalty or understanding a project to see if there's a royalty over it, to getting a deal done with an eclectic group of sellers around the globe and closing those royalties at a higher rate than anybody else in the world. Today is really what separates our business from everybody else. We have a huge competitive advantage. We built our business around that and we continue to execute.
SH: I have to mention your stock has had a very nice bump over the last three months…increasing by about 25% in value since mid-December. What can you tell our investor audience regarding the current valuation of your stock and why you think it’s still a good buy right now?
KF: The analyst consensus on Vox is that we're trading at about one times NAV. For investors that are just getting exposed to this industry, that really means one times net present value of the royalties that you have in your portfolio but there's a couple of things to understand about that. One we don't believe that NPV is truly reflective of all the value that's in the portfolio. There's a tremendous amount of royalties that are deemed exploration stage that have a lot more value than what we purchased but they're carried at book value. We continue to see these royalties advancing that hundreds of thousands of meters being drilled, billions of dollars of capital being spent is advancing what isn't getting much credit within our current book of business or current asset portfolio advancing that to where analysts will be forced to essentially revalue those interests, but take all of that, take those excluded, we trade it basically one times average our closest comps in the marketplace, really trade closer to two times the average. So at one times the average to two times the average or some more in between there, there's a lot of value to be created just in terms of that rerating potential but put all of that to the side, we continue to find unbelievable opportunities, great assets at great value that we continue to systematically bring into our portfolio. If we never achieve that rerating, we continue to find and create value for our shareholders systematically on a repeat basis like no other company in the industry and so we ultimately believe that we deserve a premium multiple to where most of our comps in the marketplace trade we're trading in a discount, we believe we're going to close that gap. The NASDAQ listing will be a helpful tool in that respect but we believe we're going to close that gap over the coming months in quarter.
SH: What’s the long-term strategy for the company moving forward and what should retail, private equity, and institutional investors be looking out for?
KF: Continued discipline and focus. We have what I believe is an industry leading business model in many respects being focused on what separates us from the competition that's in the sector that allows us to find better value in volume for our investors, doing that on a continued basis it systematically ahead of everybody else in the sector, we're going to continue that focus and that discipline. Ultimately, our business transitions either into a big dividend payer or we're bought out by a larger company that's lower cost to capital, that's really the end game for a company like us but in the meantime we're a growth company. We're creating a tremendous amount of value for shareholders. I believe last year we added more nav value per share probably than any other royalty company in the space. We've been able to do that because we continue to find very interesting opportunities at very good value for our shareholders.
SH: Can you tell our audience a little bit about your corporate management and board teams, along with the experience and innovative ideas they bring to the precious metals royalties space?
KF: It's really a company built from the ground up and focused on our investors. The first investors that we had in the business this many, many years ago now holds every share that they held at that and purchased in at that point in time. We have continued management has bought into the business and the open market contributed in our previous financings. We're all very aligned, management runs about 15% of the business. Again, I speak to the alignment of our business from our board to our you management team. We are fighting to create long term shareholder value and maximize that shareholder value for the stakeholders in our business. I think we continue to execute on that very well from a fundamental perspective, what does the management team bring to the table? We have three mining engineers and geologists on the team.
The team is very technically savvy, decades of experience in those relevant capacities, over a billion-and-a-half dollars of loyalty and transactional experience. There's a lot of royalty companies with a lot of people that don't have a broad depth of experience in the space operating companies. That's not Vox. Vox has a tremendous depth in this market years and years of experience, years and years of transactional execution, expertise that is not present frankly, in a lot of the companies in our industry. I think our investors, because of our alignment owning so much of the company as shareholders ourselves, is contributing to that process and being so technically focused with our competitive advantages, I think we are really a case study in how to align a management team with the best interests of the shareholders and executing on that mission.
SH: And finally, Kyle, if there’s anything I’ve overlooked the floor is all yours.
KF: I think we covered pretty much everything, grateful for the opportunity to be on program. For new investors learning about Vox . We're very, very well positioned in today's times, you're facing an unprecedented in many respects suite of challenges in terms of where to invest money. We appreciate the interest in Vox. We believe that we're very, very well positioned with leverage mainly to mesh precious metals prices also to base and battery metals. We're not exposed to a lot of the inflationary pressures and we're really, really well set from a geopolitical standpoint with most of our assets in tier one mining jurisdiction. We believe we're a solution in what is a very difficult backdrop and challenging backdrop for investors. Right now, we have a lot of momentum fundamentally we're going to continue executing and if there's an interest in learning more, voxroyalty.com is a great place to go. You can always drop us an email us at ir@voxroyalty.com, as well. I'm on there quite frequently but appreciate the interest and Dave, thank you again for having us on the program.
For regular updates, visit
www.voxroyalty.com.
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.