'You need to fire yourself’ - Collective Mining's Ari Sussman on gold miners not doing M&A

While M&A is heating up due to good gold prices, there is not a lot to acquire, said Ari Sussman, executive chair of Collective Mining.

This week Sussman spoke to Kitco Mining at the 2024 Precious Metals Summit Beaver Creek in Colorado.

Collective Mining Ltd. (NYSE: CNL) is a copper, silver, gold and tungsten exploration company with projects in Caldas, Colombia. The company has options to acquire 100% interests in two projects located directly within an established mining camp with ten fully permitted and operating mines. Collective’s management team was formerly at Continental Gold Inc., which was sold to Zijin Mining for approximately $2 billion.

Collective Mining’s flagship project, Guayabales, is anchored by the Apollo system, which hosts the large-scale, bulk-tonnage and high-grade copper-silver-gold-tungsten Apollo porphyry system. The company says it has strong insider ownership at 45%.

With gold hitting several all-time highs, Sussman said M&A is heating up.

“I can tell you from my experience, I've never seen the cupboards this bare with quality projects,” said Sussman. ”I suspect we're going to see M&A turn aggressive very quickly.”

Sussman said it is an opportune time for the big gold producers to start acquiring.

“If you're a gold producer and you're not active in M&A, I think you need to fire yourself as management, because you're trading at decent multiples, and the…multiples of non-producers are a fraction of yours. So effectively right now, just about any transaction is accretive.”

Sussman admitted that mining in Colombia is challenging, but the government system helps investment.

“Well, I don't want to get up here and say it's gone amazing, because I think the government's been horribly disorganized,” said Sussman. “But what has come out of this is very positive. The most important thing is the government system is set up the same as the United States, meaning there's strong check and balances…and the constitutional court in Columbia is actually very independent.”

Sussman said some of the more challenging mining laws have been “properly thwarted by either the Congress or the constitutional courts.

Coverage of the 2024 Precious Metals Summit Beaver Creek in Colorado is sponsored by Newcore Gold.

0:00 - Update on Guayabales
2:41 - Good projects are rare
4:02 - Raising funds
5:02 - Plans at Guayabales over the next 12 months
7:00 - M&A in the resource sector
10:44 - Working in Colombia
15:23 - The year ahead for gold

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