Grade & ScaleThin moat

In mining, cost is mostly a function of two things you are largely handed by geology: grade and scale. Grade is how many grams of gold sit in a tonne of rock; scale is how many tonnes you can move a day. Higher grade means more gold recovered for the same digging and crushing; larger scale means the huge fixed costs of a mine — the pit, the mill, the trucks, the workforce — are spread across more ounces. Together they set where a mine lands on the industry cost curve, and Barrick's best assets sit low precisely because they are both sizable and reasonably rich.

This is why 'Tier-One' bundles size, life, and cost into one label: they are the same fact seen from different angles. A big, good-grade, long-life deposit is automatically a low-cost one, and low cost is what lets Barrick keep earning when the gold price turns down and everyone else is losing money.

The uncomfortable truth underneath is that grade is a gift that keeps shrinking. Miners take the highest-grade ore first because it is the most profitable, so the average grade of almost every mature deposit — and of the industry as a whole — has fallen for decades. Barrick fights this with scale and technology, moving ever more rock to hold ounces level, but the geological tide runs one way. The advantage is real today — AISC near $1,637 an ounce on 3.26 million ounces of 2025 production¹ — but it is not a widening one.