NEWMONT Corp /DE/ (NEM) stock intrinsic value fair value estimate & owner earnings analysis

Newmont is the world's largest gold producer, and since absorbing Newcrest Mining in November 2023 it also produces meaningful copper and silver from mines in Ghana, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Mexico, Suriname, Argentina, Nevada, and a Dominican Republic joint venture. Following the Newcrest deal, Newmont's board approved a program to sell six non-core mines (Akyem, Cerro Vanguardia, CC&V, Éléonore, Porcupine, Musselwhite and Telfer) plus a stake in the Havieron project, sharpening the portfolio around its largest, longest-life mines. Proceeds have gone toward debt reduction — total debt fell from about $7.6 billion to $5.1 billion in a single year — and toward a $2 billion share buyback the board authorized in October 2024, running through October 2026. Because the business changed so much in late 2023, we valued it using only the two full years since the merger. On a cash basis — cash actually generated, after removing the swings caused by working-capital timing and after treating stock-based compensation as a real cost rather than a free add-back, and after setting aside the portion of capital spending needed just to keep current mines running versus building new capacity — Newmont generated roughly $3.40 per share in 2024 and about $9.04 per share in 2025, the big jump driven mainly by a much higher gold price. We used the average of the two years as our normalized starting point rather than assuming the stronger year continues. Because owner earnings nearly tripled in one year, we did not extrapolate that pace. Our base case assumes a normal single-digit start (helped by the new Ahafo North mine in Ghana, expected to reach production around late 2025, and by continued share buybacks) tapering toward roughly flat by the back half of the decade, once Newmont's next disclosed projects — the Tanami Expansion in Australia (targeted for 2027) and an expansion at the Cadia mine in Australia — have been absorbed. None of our cases assume the price of gold moves up or down from where it has recently been; we let the three cases differ only on how well Newmont executes. The bear case reflects things that have already happened here, not hypotheticals: a 2023 labor strike at the Peñasquito mine in Mexico that materially cut cash flow for a stretch, and a pattern of large non-cash write-downs — nearly $1.9 billion in 2023 and a further $1.1 billion tied to the divested mines in 2024 — suggesting Newmont has, more than once, paid more for assets than they returned. The bear case assumes flat-to-declining earning power for several years before stabilizing. The bull case assumes the disclosed growth projects land on the schedule and budget the company itself has guided to, and that the authorized buyback and debt paydown continue as planned. On this basis, we estimate a bear-case value of about $97 per share, a base case around $146, and a bull case near $174. The single biggest thing that could make all three of these numbers too high is the price of gold itself: this entire valuation rests on 2025's much stronger cash generation, which came substantially from a higher realized gold price, and we have deliberately not modeled a pullback in that price in any case, since that would mean speculating on the metals market rather than valuing the business. A reader should treat that as the largest source of uncertainty here — larger than the spread between our bear and bull cases. We would also note that Newmont's 2025 working-capital detail was reported differently than in prior years and had to be estimated from underlying balance-sheet data rather than read directly, adding some additional uncertainty to that year's figure specifically. Given that commodity-price risk sits outside our named cases, the margin-of-safety price carries a meaningful cushion — the margin-of-safety price is around $65 per share.