Production ScaleNarrow moat

Barrick and Newmont are the two supermajors of gold mining, each producing several million ounces a year — Barrick mined 3.26 million in 2025¹ — an order of magnitude more than the mid-tier miners beneath them. Scale of this kind confers real, if modest, advantages. Corporate overhead, exploration budgets, technical expertise, and financing capacity are spread across a huge production base, lowering their cost per ounce. And only a company of this size can fund several billion-dollar mine builds and expansions at once without betting the company on any one of them.

Size also brings a seat at every table. A supermajor is the partner governments want for a nation-defining project, the operator joint-venture counterparts trust with a shared asset, and the buyer with the balance sheet to take on a distressed rival's mines in a downturn. That standing is worth something an emerging miner cannot buy.

But scale in a price-taking industry has a hard ceiling on its value. Because Barrick cannot influence the gold price no matter how large it grows, size does not give it the pricing power that scale confers in, say, a network business. Worse, sheer size makes the depletion treadmill harder, not easier: replacing three million ounces a year takes far more discovery and acquisition than replacing three hundred thousand. Scale makes Barrick more efficient and more durable; it does not lift it above the commodity it sells, and it deepens the replacement problem it can never solve.