by Richard Roberts, Editorial Director, Beacon Events

Gold has taken centre stage at the world’s main mining investment events this year and it will be in the spotlight again at IMARC in Sydney in October, according to EMR Capital CEO Jason Chang. I spoke with the Hong Kong-based mining investment leader about five critical gold storylines that will get plenty of attention at this year’s conference.

Chang, a key IMARC figure since day one of the event more than a decade ago, says mining’s buy-versus-build debate remains lively after a big year of global gold-sector consolidation. Australia and Canada led that action.

Equity values are still in the spotlight amid physical gold’s record price surge. Where they go from here is a major talking point.

Another one is the yellow metal’s traditional role in a bifurcating world financial system which is also seeing the rise of cryptocurrencies.

And then there is the positioning of gold in equity portfolios.

Chang says it’s a centrepiece for EMR and for a long time has had a standout stablemate in copper. International and Australian gold leaders are investing strategically in copper and it is becoming an increasingly vital part of their revenue and profit mix.

Antimony at close to US$60,000 a tonne is another commodity forming a highly attractive double-act with gold. IMARC 2025’s Mining & Investment Hub will feature the likes of sector rising star Southern Cross Gold and Trigg Minerals, a company near the front of the starting grid in the race to meet domestic US antimony needs.

Buy versus build

Our recent review of the global mining and metals deal space in 2024-2025 highlighted the gold focus of more than half the US$71 billion worth of significant M&A and financing transactions during the period. Australia accounted for more than a quarter of the overall deal total and figured prominently in the list of big deals with Northern Star-De Grey ($3.25 billion), Gold Fields-Gold Road ($2.4 billion), Ramelius-Spartan ($1.55 billion) and Westgold-Karora ($0.8 billion) leading the way.

Gold-sector M&A reportedly accounted for nearly 75% of calendar 2024 mining deal value.

EMR acquired the Ravenswood gold mine in north-west Queensland with Indonesia’s Golden Energy and Resources in 2020 and the 50-50 partners have been building production and resources at the site while Chang says his firm has also kept an eye on other opportunities in the Australian gold space.

“We are very positive on gold long term in terms of valuation and activity,” he says.

“The next question is, well how hard is it to look for more gold resources? And the answer is, it is pretty difficult. We have two-thirds of our capital invested in Australia. It’s not 100% explored but it’s a pretty mature market: to hunt and build is not that simple.”

S&P Global said this month global gold exploration spending fell again in 2024, by 7%, after dipping 15% in 2023. The falls came – as gold prices continued to climb – after six years of rising gold exploration expenditure. S&P said the 2024 drop reflected reduced junior company allocations.

“We’re seeing a very active M&A dynamic, partly because the cost of building from ground zero has skyrocketed, especially in Australia,” Chang says. “We see that across our entire portfolio.

“So a lot of people are thinking it’s actually cheaper and more efficient to buy. But the fact is, it’s pretty difficult to buy anything.

“There’s a lot of competition.”

Sandra Close, director of Melbourne-based Surbiton Associates, said this month increased operating margins for Australian gold producers had swollen their cash and bullion reserves to more than A$6 billion. She said the cash abundance could fuel more acquisitions, “although prices now paid to obtain such new assets are very high”.

Chang says: “The gold price is going up. There’ll be volatility but we think the trend is very much upwards.

“I don’t think it will stop the M&A activity; I think it will continue to be highly active, like we’ve seen the last 12 months. Some of the gold equities are not tracking the gold commodity price, which is another reason there’s going to be more equity-based acquisitions.”

Equity values

Evolution Mining CEO Lawrie Conway says FY26 is shaping as “almost a rinse and repeat” of the 12 months to June 30 this year, as it is for many producers. The difference is likely to be a higher average bullion price, with the metal’s surge to unprecedented levels (after climbing 41% June 2024-to-June 2025) set to translate into expanded revenues and profit margins.

“General market sentiment towards gold and gold equities has shifted positively, albeit with a lag,” Australian investment firm Shaw & Partners said in a recent report. “Recent [gold price] strength, coupled with the historical tendency for gold mining equities to amplify gold’s movements in a bull market, suggests the potential catch-up in stock valuations is still largely yet to play out.”

Conway, a 30-year industry veteran, says margin expansion drove gold equity outperformance at a time of rising gold prices, low inflation and interest rates, and a relatively lower sector cost base between 2016 and 2020. “Coming out of COVID [we’ve seen] higher inflation, rising interest rates … and margin compression in the sector,” he said at this month’s Diggers & Dealers Forum in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. “The gold equity side underperformed in that period.

“Now we’re seeing record price movement. The last $1000 of gold price movement took just on four months … And what that’s meaning is you’re starting to see margin expansion for gold companies.

“I think as an industry we’ve been poor allocators of capital through these periods when you get record margins and it is imperative for us as we go through this cycle that we apply discipline in terms of capital investment so that when you do see that cycle turn our shareholders aren’t left looking and saying, where is the cash?”

For gold juniors equity price performance has been mixed. However, IMARC 2025’s Mining & Investment Hub will give investors a view of some of the market’s sharpest golds-space movers. As well as Trigg Minerals (up 145% year-to-date) and Southern Cross Gold (up 60% ytd) they include Kairos Minerals (plus-130% in 2025), which has embarked on a 30km drill program at the promising Mt York gold project in Western Australia’s Pilbara region. The project, which has 1.4-million-ounce gold resource on it, is circa-55km south-east of the Hemi project under development as Australia’s next large-scale gold mine.

Kairos managing director Dr Peter Turner says the scale of the drilling program underlines the company’s belief it can keep growing a resource base that stood at about 120,000oz when it bought Mt York in 2016, and build a prefeasibility study reserve.

“It’s sending a message that there’s a lot more gold to be found on the project,” he says. “We think we can grow the project substantially again in terms of the resource base.”

Gold versus crypto

Chang says news of gold bullion’s demise may have been greatly exaggerated. “There has been all this discussion in the past two decades about gold eventually losing relevance but it’s actually gained more relevance,” he says.

“I don’t see gold being replaced by Bitcoin anytime soon, or crypto. And I think there’s a lot of backing for that commentary in recent times [with] central banks buying more gold.”

Indeed, the World Gold Council said gold demand pushed past US$100 billion for the first time in a quarter last year. John Forwood, chief investment officer at Melbourne-based Lowell Resources Funds Management, says the gold price has risen by circa-13 times since former UK prime minister Gordon Brown famously sold the Bank of England’s bullion in 2000.

“The gold price increased at an average of 8% annually in the 25 years from 1999–2024. And ironically it is now central banks, particularly the Chinese as they push towards de-dollarisation, which are the largest buyers of gold,” Forwood says. “In fact, the European Central Bank has recently reported that in 2024 gold overtook the euro as the world’s second most important reserve asset for central banks. Bullion accounted for 20% of global official reserves in 2024, outstripping the euro’s 16% and only behind the US dollar at 46%.”

Chang highlights what is happening in north Asia as being particularly significant given China and India alone are said to account for more than 20% of global gold import volumes, and China is the fastest-growing importer of the metal by US dollar value. He says the start-up of Shanghai Gold Exchange’s first offshore bullion storage facility in Hong Kong, amid the special administrative region’s (SAR) broader positioning as a global commodities trading centre, underlines its growing centrality in the gold and wider metal trading world.

London Bullion Market Association consultant Doris Bao has said: “The [Hong Kong Gold] vault means that China can now import gold in yuan rather than dollars, significantly bolstering Beijing’s broader strategy of reducing dollar dependence in commodities trading.”

And respected Red Cloud Securities commodities strategist Kenneth Hoffman said this month that, “China still loves gold, which is especially important in these times of global trade uncertainty”.

“The United States seems determined to devalue its currency, and the number one beneficiary will continue to be gold,” Hoffman said. “The relationship between the DXY [US dollar index] and gold has been roughly for every 1% decline in the DXY, gold rises by 3% as the world reallocates currencies from US dollars to gold, which is already Central Banks’ second largest holding.

“The movement of the DXY to retest the lows of 2008 and 2011 could send gold to near US$7000/oz with momentum at that point giving potential for a much higher move.”

Chang says gold is seen as both currency and the ultimate hedge against risk “in a world where there’s so much volatility”.

“I’m not suggesting the US dollar won’t be the world’s prominent currency for a long time to come,” he says.

“Nevertheless, where there’s so much volatility in the world on all fronts, including politics and conflicts, people are now going to allocate, or at least they’re going to think harder about allocating, some portion of their wealth into hedge assets. Gold is certainly one of them.”

Gold and copper

Chang thinks the world is slowly waking up to the fact that significant new primary copper supply is extremely long-dated but it doesn’t mean a choked global project development pipeline is going to be freed up any time soon. BHP said last year the world would need an estimated 10 million tonnes a year of new mined copper supply by 2035. Even if new mines are approved tomorrow, which few are pointing to, the development schedules of major recent projects such as Oyu Tolgoi and Kamoa-Kakula suggest additional large-scale mines won’t be ramping up before 2035.

“Supply is getting very, very tough,” Chang says. “I mean, we are now mining half the grade of copper we were mining [35] years ago.

“Our view, and my view certainly, is that the sector undervalued given that the market is still very short term focused and does not fully appreciate the difficulty in getting new supply and ramping up supply.”

Copper and gold’s chemical as well as growing corporate symbiosis is highly significant given the latter’s hefty share of global annual mineral exploration expenditure and top-100 company revenues and profits. Surplus gold wealth flowing into copper is a positive. Copper is a more than handy byproduct for gold companies.

Experienced Australian analyst, Minelife’s Gavin Wendt, says a convergence of the traditional market bell-weather and safe-haven metals, copper and gold, respectively, is a “changing scenario globally”.

“We have seen some of our miners and internationally some gold mining companies diverging into copper,” he says. “[Geologically] copper does occur with gold. So by default, a lot of gold companies with some of their operations indirectly become copper producers as well. The other aspect to it as well is that copper is increasingly a key component of the energy transition and all forecasts for copper suggest higher prices and exponential growth in demand.

“Increasingly we will see gold companies looking at the opportunity to perhaps expand their operations, not taking their focus off gold specifically, but looking to enhance the profitability, the commerciality and also the investor appeal of what they’re doing by moving increasingly towards copper. 

“Whereas gold companies that used to have copper exposure previously were probably penalised in the market now I think you can almost attract a premium for having that copper exposure and offering it to investors.”

There are few better examples of this in the world than Evolution Mining, which runs two of Australia’s lowest-cost metal mines.

“Northparkes and Ernest Henry are low-cost copper mines in tier-one jurisdictions [New South Wales and Queensland, respectively],” says Conway. Copper accounts for 25-30% of the company’s revenue – A$4.35 billion in FY25 – and is a “buffer that enables us to sustain our margin and not have that [earnings] volatility”.

Notably, world gold majors such as Newmont and Barrick are pursuing similar copper goals.

“The copper supply-demand gap is widening,” says Conway.

“If you look at the treating and refining costs on the supply side they are at all-time lows, which means there is not enough copper being produced to meet the demand side. There is not enough to keep those smelters operating.

“The outlook is for higher prices as we go forward in real terms.

“So copper is really a great differentiator in our portfolio.”

Gold and antimony

It takes something special to draw the spotlight away from gold at mining conferences these days. But evidently antimony at more than US$50,000 a tonne does the trick.

Southern Cross Gold was one of the star attractions at the recent Diggers & Dealers forum in Kalgoorlie and the focus will shift to Sydney where CEO Michael Hudson will again take centre stage at IMARC. “Multi-million-ounce, 10-gram deposits are incredibly rare,” he says. “We’re one of a few globally and now we have a gold market that is absolutely ripping and we’ve got a ripping project in a ripping market, so that really sets us apart.”

Southern Cross Gold has generated an exploration target of 2.2-to-3.2 million ounces gold-equivalent at an average grade of 8.3-10.6 grams per tonne gold-equivalent at Sunday Creek in Victoria. The company’s market value has soared above A$1.6 billion. It is fully funded for more than $140 million of exploration and one of the biggest drilling programs seen on Victoria’s historically significant Costerfield gold and antimony belt for many years.

“We’ve got nine rigs drilling today and we’re going to 22 rigs over the next year,” Hudson says.

In a research note this month on Trigg Minerals, East Coast Research described the antimony market as a “case study in supply chain vulnerability”.

“China’s control of approximately 83% of global refined production has given it immense geopolitical leverage,” it said. “Implementing dual-use export licenses in September 2024 signals its willingness to use this dominance. The result has been market chaos, with prices surging from approximately A$20,000 per tonne in 2022 to A$93,000 per tonne in August 2025. 

“This supply shock is colliding with a wave of demand from the world’s most crucial industries.”

They include defence, energy and advanced tech.

East Coast says Trigg’s exposure to antimony and now tungsten “significantly strengthens its strategic positioning in the critical minerals landscape”.

“These dual commodities are essential to defence, energy and advanced manufacturing, and both are listed on the US Critical Minerals List. This diversification not only boosts Trigg’s appeal to downstream offtake partners and government stakeholders, but also reduces single-commodity risk, enhances funding optionality, and supports a more robust, resilient valuation outlook.”

For more information and to register for IMARC 2025, please visit the IMARC Website. 

About IMARC: Collaborating on trends in mining, investment and innovation towards a sustainable future

IMARC is the premier gathering for the most influential minds in the mining industry, a dynamic hub where ideas ignite, and inspiration flows – it is the ultimate meeting ground for global industry leaders. As Australia’s largest and most significant mining event, IMARC attracts over 10,000 decision-makers, industry leaders, policymakers, investors, commodity buyers, technical experts, innovators, and educators from more than 120 countries. For three action-packed days, attendees will engage in cutting-edge learning, forge valuable deals, and experience unparalleled networking opportunities.