Newmont Corporation

Newmont Corporation is the world's largest gold mining company, producing 5.89 million attributable ounces of gold in fiscal 2025 alongside material quantities of copper, silver, zinc, and lead from operations across the United States, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Ghana, Suriname, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, the Dominican Republic, and Canada. The company generated $22.1 billion in revenue and $7.1 billion in net income in fiscal 2025, supported by an average realized gold price of $3,498 per ounce — roughly 45% higher than the prior year.

This is a story about a century-old mining franchise that, through the $13.5 billion Newcrest acquisition in November 2023 and a subsequent portfolio rationalization that shed six non-core mines, has concentrated itself around a dozen Tier 1 operations with reserve lives measured in decades. The transformation was expensive and disruptive — the company posted net losses in both 2022 and 2023, driven by impairment charges and merger-related costs — but the financial payoff arrived with force in 2025, when record free cash flow of $7.3 billion funded $3.4 billion in shareholder returns and left the balance sheet in a net cash position for the first time in recent memory.

The file turns on a simple but consequential question: whether 2026 represents a genuine trough in the production cycle, as management insists, or whether the 14% year-over-year production decline that accompanied the divestiture program masks a more persistent difficulty in replacing depleted ounces. Newmont's response — an enhanced capital allocation framework, a structural cost-reduction program, and a $6 billion buyback authorization — is coherent and well-funded. The debate is whether the market, which prices the company at roughly 6 times trailing EBITDA, is adequately discounting the execution risk embedded in that response.