Comparable universe for mining companies?
Trying to do a comp table for my sophomore SA, and I'm have a bit of trouble selecting a proper comparable universe. The company I'm valuing is a ~$300M gold company with operations in just one country in west Africa. So far, all the other companies I find are around the same market cap, but are in significantly different geographies, like Canada, Australia, South America, where I imagine the cost structures and regulations to be different. I can only find one or two other companies in the same country, but their size fluctuates wildly, from about $5M to $2B, and nothing near my target company. Also, when valuing a gold company, should you only compare it to other gold companies?
So how should I select what companies to use? I realize this is more of an art than a science, but I am kind of at a loss here.
Look at old comparable sets in your groups folder..
We don't have any since I'm working at a boutique shop and no one has really done any modeling here.
So, I cover mining at my SA role but on the large cap side.
If I were you I would look at annual ounces of gold produced and base comps off of that. Take Freeport McMoRan, for example. It produces gold as a by-product of its Indonesia copper mining, but you can easily come up with a total value for its gold production and piece out the P/E multiple from this.
I would probably just stick to gold producers in your comp universe, since it's a commodity and it doesn't really behave like other metals since it's used as an inflation hedge more than pretty much anything.
You're right in that different countries have different regulations, taxes, royalty arrangements, etc. And it's unlikely that a firm like Barrick would be a good comp for your firm. But Central African Gold might.
Check this out to get an idea of gold producers and size:
http://www.24hgold.com/english/listcompanies.aspx?fundamental=true
Find firms that have similar production levels to your firm, then check out their structures, see which are public, etc. At $300M value, a $2B might not be ideal but it's probably not terrible either. $5M is too low, though. You can find a lot of small cap gold producers just on that list alone. A quick scan reveals:
BRD (336M) CDE (2.5B) ANV (3.6B) BVN (10.5B) BAA (886M) PAAS (3.6B) HL (2.3B)
What about bloomberg/capIQ/factset? I thought you could see a list of possible comps there?
EDIT
Shit never mind. NorthEastIdiot to the rescue.
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