In short: His own company, in a sponsored segment. Five-year plan from ~60k to ~200k gold-equivalent oz/yr plus 5 Moz silver, funded by its 30% of Manh Choh (40–45k oz in the 2026 low year, ~75k oz in 2027) and the direct-ship-ore model at Lucky Shot, Johnson Tract and Kitsault. Debt ~$47M, debt-free by end-2027. Value it "more like a royalty company… Kinross does all the work and we get a dividend check," with self-funded development assets on top — and "we only have 33 million shares outstanding," so "you get the best leverage on a per share basis with Contango."
Contango is a small gold and silver miner formed by merging Contango ORE (Alaska) with Dolly Varden Silver (British Columbia); it now trades as CTG. Its one producing asset is a 30% stake in the Manh Choh mine in Alaska. Kinross owns the other 70% and runs everything: a contractor digs the ore and trucks it to Kinross's existing Fort Knox processing plant. Contango never had to build a plant or a tailings dam (the pond where processed waste rock is stored), which is why it got into production cheaply and quickly. This year is deliberately weak — mining is moving between pits, so output is low and costs high — but next year the richer ore arrives and Contango's share should rise to about 75,000 ounces.
The growth plan repeats the same trick. Lucky Shot, Johnson Tract and Kitsault are all meant to be dug and shipped to someone else's plant (or a plant Contango buys) rather than built from scratch. That only works if the rock is rich enough to pay for the trucking, which is why he insists on a real mine plan at 10–12 grams of gold per tonne, not a one-off test shipment. Skipping the plant and tailings dam also shortens permitting, which he says is the step that usually traps small miners for 5–10 years.
His case for the stock is about arithmetic. Treat the Manh Choh stake like a royalty — Contango just collects a cheque each quarter — and use that cash to build the other projects instead of selling new shares. With only 33 million shares outstanding (most peers have hundreds of millions), every dollar of profit or every move in the gold or silver price is spread over far fewer shares. He plans to be debt-free by the end of 2027. Keep in mind this is the CEO, speaking in a segment his company paid for.
29:02That's not the best way to look at the company. Would you agree with that, or how should investors look at your company in terms of valuation? — I think we kind of fit more of a — we're a development stage company. With our Mow operation, from our perspective, we're more like a royalty company. Kin Ross does all the work and we get a dividend check once a quarter from the operation, and to date they've been spot on.
In short: "I think it was an intelligent merger" — combining the two companies "gave you the heft and scale that would allow you to attract more index buying," with Shawn Khunkhun stepping aside for Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse's build-and-operate experience, "a remarkably selfless and intelligent action." Two reservations. There is no anchor asset: "If I had a criticism of the combined company, it's that there's no tier one deposit. There's a collection of tier 2 deposits… some fairly high quality tier two and tier three assets." And he dissents on the sequencing — cash from the existing Alaska mine into Lucky Shot, then Tidewater, all direct-shipping ore, with the Dolly Varden–Homestake Ridge integration deferred: "the market likes that strategy. I don't, but I'm not a market."
Contango ORE has merged with Dolly Varden Silver, and Rick's verdict is genuinely split. He calls the merger "intelligent": the combined company has the size to attract index buying, and Dolly's CEO recognised that the next phase was building and operating rather than exploring, then handed the job to someone with more construction experience — "a remarkably selfless and intelligent action."
His first reservation is about quality. "There's no tier one deposit. There's a collection of tier 2 deposits" — decent assets, real free cash flow, a coherent plan, but nothing that would make a major miner desperate to own it.
His second is about sequencing, and it's the more interesting disagreement. The plan is to use cash from the existing Alaska mine to develop a series of small, very high-grade deposits whose ore can be shipped directly for processing — quick cash, fast payback. Deferred to later is the hard exploration work of linking Dolly Varden's silver deposit to the gold deposit above it, which is the one thing that "could give you a strong tier 2 deposit or even a tier one deposit." Fast money now, at the cost of the big prize later. "The market likes that strategy. I don't, but I'm not a market."
26:47The first is that a lot of the exploration and delineation at Dolly had taken place, that the next stage was construction and operation and he also understood that combining those two companies gave you the heft and scale that would allow you to attract more index buying and he was emotionally mature enough to decide that Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse had more experience in the construction development and operation side and stepped down as CEO.
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Verbatim excerpts from the public transcripts (auto-pulled at each mention's timestamp, lightly cleaned). Timestamps link into the video; "source page" opens that commentator's full analysis at this row. Click a mention's header line to expand it (one open at a time). For personal study — not investment advice.