Newmont: The Largest Producer, and Barrick's PartnerNarrow moat

Newmont produced 5.89 million attributable ounces in 2025, comfortably the largest in the world and roughly 80 percent more than Barrick¹. It is also Barrick's joint-venture partner in Nevada Gold Mines, the single most valuable thing Barrick owns.

That is an unusual competitive relationship and it produces unusual behaviour. The two companies compete for assets, for exploration ground, for investor capital and for the industry's technical people, while jointly operating a complex whose capital plans require both of them to agree. The 2026 settlement that vends Fourmile and adjacent ground into the joint venture — covered in the Future Bets rather than restated here — deepens the entanglement further, creating a combined Nevada complex of extraordinary scale in which each company's best ounces are partly the other's.

The competitive question that matters is whether the arrangement serves Barrick more than Newmont. The synergies from combining two adjacent Nevada districts were real and large, and no alternative existed that did not involve both companies destroying value by operating around each other. Against that, a partner has a claim on the cash flow from the best orebodies in the portfolio and a vote on what happens to them.

Newmont's own position is not obviously superior: it trades near the industry average multiple, and its scale advantage in a price-taking business buys the same limited things Barrick's does.

Watch attributable Nevada production against contributed capital. That ratio is the only honest scoreboard on whether the partnership is paying.