Triple Flag Precious Metals (TFPM)

The New Wave, Grown Up

Triple Flag is the youngest company in the large-cap royalty and streaming peer group, and the clearest evidence that the model's economics attracted serious new capital after 2020. Founded in 2016 and listed in May 2021, it has built a portfolio of 242 assets, 17 streams and 225 royalties, in under a decade. Franco-Nevada took forty years to assemble its book at a comparable scale. In 2025 it sold 113,237 gold equivalent ounces (GEOs) for $388.7 million of revenue, with earnings per share and operating cash flow per share also at record levels.

A gold equivalent ounce is the company's way of adding gold, silver and copper deliveries into one number, by converting everything to the gold price at a stated ratio. The ratio is chosen, not fixed, so a GEO count is only comparable to another company's if you know the assumptions behind both.

Its arrival also changed the industry it joined. Triple Flag is among the post-2020 entrants whose competition for streams and royalties helped push deal prices up, and it still bids in that market: it paid US$440 million in June 2026 for a gold stream on the producing Ravenswood mine in Queensland. What a stream costs per annual ounce depends far more on the stage of the mine and the length of the entitlement than on the year it was signed, a point worked through in our guide to EV/GEO and implied deal prices. What is not in dispute is the direction of travel: more buyers chasing the same producing assets means richer prices for sellers and thinner underwriting returns for everyone, Triple Flag included.

Where the Ounces Come From

For a 242-asset portfolio, the cash flow is strikingly concentrated. Three assets supplied 57.8% of 2025 GEOs. Triple Flag splits revenue for Northparkes alone, so the top-three share is struck on gold-equivalent ounces.

We screen at top-3 concentration below 50% as healthy and above 60% as a concentration risk. Triple Flag's 57.8% sits just under the risk line, better than Wheaton, whose Salobo stream alone is 44.9% of revenue, but well above Franco-Nevada. The long tail of 225 royalties provides optionality and a pipeline, but the equity story today is carried by two assets: a copper-gold mine in Australia and a silver stream that has just got smaller. Ravenswood, bought in June 2026, is meant to become a third, with its first deliveries falling in the third quarter.

Cerro Lindo: The Live Step-Down Example

Many streaming contracts carry step-down clauses, and Triple Flag owns the sector's clearest live illustration of what they do. The Cerro Lindo silver stream entitled Triple Flag to 65% of payable silver until cumulative deliveries reached 19.5 million ounces, and 25% after that. By the end of 2025, 18.9 million ounces had been delivered. The threshold was crossed early in 2026 and the lower rate took effect with deliveries from April. The mine keeps producing exactly as before; Triple Flag's share of its silver fell by more than half, on schedule, because the contract said so.

Two consequences follow. First, 2025 is the last full year at the old rate, so the asset's 23.8% revenue share overstates what it will contribute from here. That, together with mine sequencing at Northparkes, is why the company guided 2026 to 95,000-105,000 GEOs against 113,237 sold in 2025, later raised to 100,000-110,000 with the half-year results. Cerro Lindo delivered 8,053 GEOs in the first quarter of 2026 and 4,890 in the second. Any model extrapolating from 2025 deliveries without reading the contract will be wrong. Second, this is why a stream cannot be valued on a flat delivery assumption. Margin per ounce times ounces only works when the ounces follow the contractual schedule, step-downs included. The mechanics are in our guide to valuing a metal stream, where Cerro Lindo is the worked example.

Ravenswood, the Australian gold stream bought in June 2026, is built the same way and shows how routine this is. Triple Flag takes 5.50% of payable gold until 194,200 ounces have been delivered, then 3.75%, then 2.50% after 253,000 ounces, while the price it pays the operator per ounce rises from 10% of spot to 20% at the first threshold. Two step-downs and a payment step-up are written into the deal from day one. A buyer who models the headline percentage in perpetuity is valuing a contract that does not exist.

The Tax Structure Reality

Triple Flag is routinely lumped in with the offshore-shell stereotype of the streaming sector. The filings say otherwise. It is a Canadian corporation, headquartered in Toronto, and its consolidated effective tax rate in FY2025 was about 10.9%: $29.4 million of tax on $269.4 million of pre-tax earnings. That is the lowest consolidated rate in the covered peer group, below Wheaton's 13.3%, Royal Gold's 17.8% and Franco-Nevada's 21.5%.

The blended rate hides a much higher one in one corner of the portfolio, and it is not the corner most people guess. Triple Flag's own 2026 guidance assumes Australian cash tax of about 25%, and it names the assets it falls on: the Fosterville, Beta Hunt, Stawell and Henty royalties. Northparkes, the largest asset and also Australian, is not on that list, because it is a stream held through an offshore subsidiary. Tax follows the contract and the entity holding it, not the mine's postcode.

That matters for how much of the company the adjustment touches. Those four royalties produced $36.4 million of 2025 revenue, about 9% of the total, while Australian mines as a whole produced nearly 38% once Northparkes is counted. A sum-of-parts NAV should therefore tax about a tenth of the book at 25% and leave the rest near the group rate. Taxing everything Australian at 25% instead would take several per cent off NAV for no reason in the filings. The general version of the problem, and why a generalist's 25-35% miner tax assumption understates streamer NAV by 20-30%, is the subject of our streaming tax-rate guide.

Screening: EV per GEO Versus Peers

On enterprise value per annual GEO, Triple Flag screens at about $54.2k: EV of roughly $6.14 billion against 113,237 FY2025 GEOs, versus Wheaton near $76-79k, Franco-Nevada near $80k, and OR Royalties near $87k.

EV/GEO is not a size ladder, and the spread within this table proves it: OR Royalties, the other mid-cap, trades above both seniors. Triple Flag's lower screen is therefore not automatic mid-cap treatment. It lines up with the features above: top-3 concentration near the risk line, and a forward GEO base smaller than the 2025 one because Cerro Lindo now delivers at 25%. That last point cuts directly into the multiple. The denominator here is a trailing number the company has already guided below for 2026, so the screen flatters Triple Flag against peers whose forward ounces are growing. Resolving the gap means a per-asset sum-of-parts NAV that rolls Cerro Lindo at the post-step-down rate, brings in Ravenswood from the third quarter of 2026, and taxes the four Australian royalties at 25%.

Key Risks

Asset concentration. Northparkes and Cerro Lindo together supplied over half of 2025 revenue. An operational problem at either, or an adverse change in their host jurisdictions, hits Triple Flag's cash flow in a way no part of the 225-royalty tail can offset. The sector's cautionary tale, Cobre Panama, showed that a government can switch off a portfolio's largest asset overnight.

Step-down arithmetic. The Cerro Lindo reduction is contractual and permanent, and Ravenswood carries two more step-downs of its own. Replacing lost ounces means buying them, and a producing mine's ounces cost several times what a development project's do. Triple Flag paid $440 million for Ravenswood. Growth bought at today's clearing prices earns thinner returns than the book it replaces.

Deal competition at senior prices. The competitive wave Triple Flag rode in on has not receded. Against Franco-Nevada's $3.4 billion of available capital and Wheaton's balance sheet, a $6-7 billion company bidding on the same streams pays the same clearing price with less margin for error.

Tax convergence. Pillar Two has already put a 15% floor under the sector's offshore structures. Triple Flag's ~10.9% consolidated rate has more room to rise than to fall, and every point of effective tax comes straight out of NAV.

The Bull and Bear Cases

The bull case is pipeline conversion and de-concentration. Triple Flag hit record GEOs and per-share metrics in 2025 and runs the lowest consolidated tax rate in the group. What has to go right: the 225-royalty pipeline keeps converting into producing ounces, the Ravenswood mine ramps towards more than 200,000 ounces a year by 2028, top-3 concentration falls, and Northparkes and the post-step-down Cerro Lindo book stay in reliable hands. That path grows the GEO base on operating delivery rather than on a re-rating of the screening multiple, which is the harder and more durable version of the story. The company's own 2030 outlook, raised to 150,000-160,000 GEOs after Ravenswood, is the yardstick to hold it to.

The bear case is concentration, step-down arithmetic, and the price of replacement. The 2025 GEO record was struck at a Cerro Lindo rate that no longer applies, so the growth has to come from somewhere else; the largest asset, Northparkes, is a maturing copper-gold mine mid-way through a transition to a new underground cave; and topping up the book means bidding for producing mines against Franco-Nevada and Wheaton. A smaller company pays the same clearing price with less room for underwriting error. The thesis breaks if new ounces arrive slower than the old ones deplete, or if Northparkes or Cerro Lindo hit operational or jurisdictional trouble.