Smallwood confident about bigger Wheaton Australia profile
- 21 October 2025
Wheaton Precious Metals CEO Randy Smallwood says Australian investors, including superannuation funds, already like the company’s precious metals streaming model. Next he wants to crack the local mine financing code, something he admits is a sterner test for him and his corporate development team.
“We have seen so much more appetite here,” Smallwood said on the sidelines of IMARC 2025 after presenting the US$43 billion streamer’s investment case on the main stage at the event. Not great timing, as it turns out, with Wheaton’s share price reversing in line with gold’s backtrack after this year’s powerful surge. Smallwood says he stands by his US$5000-an-ounce gold price prediction for 2026, if not by the end of this year.
“We've got corp dev teams here. We've probably made ... five or six trips to different projects in Australia and New Zealand in the last year and a half. So it’s really just a matter now of amping it up.
“I’m confident we will be adding some streams on assets here.”
Smallwood says the significant international outflow of Australia’s estimated US$2.8 trillion super fund – or pension fund as they’re known elsewhere – pool over the past decade has not only put more Aussie investors on the share registers of companies such as Wheaton it has also reduced a source of equity capital for domestic miners.
“It [the domestic mine financing market] doesn't have that artificial bias by having so much capital available from that restricted source anymore,” he says.
“For a long time the superannuation funds were forced to reinvest back into Australia, which meant that there was an abundance of capital here looking for places to invest. And we're competing. We supply capital. We were competing against that and it really made it tough to get traction into Australia.
“Up until about three or four years ago there was too much capital that was easily available internally.
“So I think it's a matter of time. We’ve seen more streams and more royalties. Royalties have existed here for a while but we’re a streaming company and we're talking to a lot more companies about financing options.
“We have recently made our first investment into Australia, [which] was a little royalty transaction but having a small royalty with a right of first refusal on subsequent financing mechanisms allows us an opportunity to deliver [a stream] in future.”
Wheaton Precious Metals has paid more than US$11 billion (and committed over $13 billion) for streams on about 20 operating mines and nearly 30 development projects predominantly in the Americas but also in Africa and parts of Europe. It’s on a circa-US$2 billion current annual revenue run rate with a 70-80% EBITDA margin and 45 full-time employees.
Smallwood says the company’s latest c40% projected growth in gold-equivalent-ounce production/revenue by 2029 is looking increasingly conservative given the high rate of investment and progress at a number of key projects by “partners”.
Wheaton makes an upfront payment for life-of-mine by-product gold or silver production, typically, from copper and other metal mines – more than 70% of its revenue currently comes from copper mines – and then pays an additional amount for delivered metal, all on an agreed spot-price formula.
“If you get to the point where you need outside capital to continue growing your company, you're either going to do debt or you're going do equity, or sometimes a combination, and we compete very well on the equity side and in fact in certain jurisdictions we actually compete very well even compared to debt,” Smallwood says.
“The huge advantage to the streaming model is the cost of capital. If your company is trading at point-three or point-four times the asset value, which is pretty typical for a single-asset development company, when we do a stream the portion of the metal we're taking away is valued at one-times net asset value [based on the spot price formula]. In fact our long term [current gold] price is higher than analyst consensus when we're pricing the deals and so from a market net asset value perspective we're actually paying more than one-times net asset value.
“It’s that competitiveness that makes streaming a very attractive source of equity capital.
“Not every project is going to be a Wheaton project. We're very, very disciplined about technical due diligence, technical excellence and we are very selective about the partners and more specifically the projects that we invest into.
“But there's definitely opportunity here in Australia and you will see our name more here.”
