C (8:57)
Yeah, so there's a lot there. And when you think as say Franco Nevada is, if you look at their journey and the returns and clearly the founding story, which is now folklore, it's been an incredible ride until they recently obviously had this Panamanian situation. So our founding was the idea of creating a high growth Franco Nevada vehicle. So gold, silver, without oil and gas, because they've had a very successful run on oil and gas. And our backgrounds have been really more in metals and mining. And so that's what we've sought to do. And the idea is strategically commit more of your capital in lower risk producing assets with good land packages, good life ability to extend mine lives or expand and to generate that cash you can reinvest. And then to your point, even you going back to Franco's founding example, it's not like someone flicked a switch, put $2 million in, woke up like five years later and they had a billion dollars in the bank. Mines take on average nearly 20 years now from discovery to develop, permitting all these government regulations and that are taking longer. So the reality is you want a model where you have diversified, high margin cash flows, good optionality and then a bucket of longer dated options which could be the next rank in the bottom. So you'll see that in our portfolio now with 234 assets, 32 of those produce that cash flow you talked about earlier. So you've got this big repository which really investors aren't focusing on, which could contain, if not the next gold strike, at least some subset of those are going to contribute meaningful ounces and growth on a longer medium to longer term horizon. And that's what makes this model so compelling, is shorter growth, high margins, and then longer dated optionality which you don't have to fund. So specifically your question on Panama, it's interesting. I was on a vacation with my wife, our anniversary in January down in Costa Rica, and our driver, who knows nothing about mining, was suddenly an expert on Panamanian mining. And I think you know the reality that he seemed to have this view, I guess through the Local media that the locals woke up one morning and someone had stuck a coffer mine on their doorstep. And this is an outrage, but there were billions of dollars invested by First Quantum in there. And I think what really happened is the government with the capital sunk in that look to renegotiate the deal and I think lost control of it at that point. And you know, people will have their views, but what ultimately happened is they've taken, I think it's 5% of their GDP and erased it for the time being and they lost control of the beast. They've just gone through an election and with that, Franco really provided a large part of the risk capital. The First Quantum to build that mine in return for that very lucrative stream, which I think was about a quarter of their NAV roughly. So you can imagine with the government doing that and then the constitutional court saying this is not legally constituted, this mine cannot continue. That was a big blow to their stock and of course I think a loss for the country. I mean everybody talks about energy transition, turns out you need copper for that. So I suspect at some point, hopefully sanity will prevail. And I do think that Franco is quite well positioned. These contracts are typically quite defensively positioned compared to equity. So usually they're. If they don't have parent guarantees, they're often either senior or second secured. You're trying to be as bankruptcy remote as possible and have an enforceable contract. And you'll find with them, given the importance of this, they'll tend to likely be patient. And I suspect if they don't recover it or get it to resume at some point, I think they should be fine. But to your specific point on Country Risk, really what we're building is a managed portfolio that is diversified and it's diversified, I mentioned the number of assets, but it's diversified by region, by operator. And you can achieve. Because this is a passive portfolio. I'm not managing management teams at mine sites. We have good relationships. But you're not doing that on a day to day. You can achieve a level of diversification that you can't replicate operationally. So what that means when it comes to country risk is you have to look at the portfolio construction to think is this acceptable if the wheels fall off? Because weird things happen sometimes. And so for us, to your point, you know, Franco lost their cornerstone assets or at least for the time being, the NAV has been impaired. I think they've taken a complete right down on that. In our case, a single biggest cornerstone of a similar percentage of nav. Is North Parks which is a copper mine that's been going for 30 odd years in Australia, five hour drive from Sydney and it's got decades of mine life ahead of it. So jurisdictionally, if you've got Panama on one hand with no mining tradition where things have not gone well and you've got a situation in Australia which has a proud mining tradition, incredible ecosystem and we think about country risk. My biggest country concentration is actually Australia, an area I've operated in for 20 odd years now. And then it's the United States and Canada and parts of South America which have got a good mining history that's about 80% of our nav. And then when we go to more exotic jurisdictions, you mentioned a point moments ago that people really don't appreciate country risk is not as simple as something open up a Fraser Institute documents or table and saying oh this place looks pretty good. It's pretty hard to try and permit a new mine in parts of the United States. In Canada, like pick your jurisdiction. There's a lot of NIMBYism I think that also goes on. And a lot of these jurisdictions make it pretty difficult to get the necessary permits to build the mines that ironically they need in their devices or in the electric vehicles or elsewhere. So when you step back from that, I think the specifics of where the mine's located, their social license to operate, because ultimately what happened in Panama was they lost their social license to operate. And so you have to be able to, when you write these contracts on your due diligence, look through the operator because very often these contracts will be around a lot longer than any particular management team. Have they got the right orientation? Have they got a good social license to operate? If they're in conflict with their governments or with their host communities, they can't just pick up the mine and go somewhere else. So that's a large part of it. And then on the portfolio construction, what percentage exposure in a diversified portfolio do you have for any particular jurisdiction? So just to drive that home, our second deal was in Wolfar Fairway and it wasn't Australia or North or South America, was in Mongolia at a time when Rio was having a tough time with the government where they've invested billions. We wrote a modest check for the size of our portfolio. It was a high teens return to compensate us for the risk. Greenfield site which we could easy diligence. And the net result of that though is I wanted a four year payback because I didn't know what the next administration would look like and whether it Be more business friendly. The election happened, it's gone well, it developed the mine. I think already we've made about 160% on our original investment and they've extended my life by a decade. So that's the sort of thing when we look at country risk and exposure and proportion of the portfolio, certainly how we try to think about that around the world.