Canada is a major gold producer, and the 10 largest Canadian gold mining companies are evidence of that, accounting for a major portion of the country’s gold digging activities.
Way before gold digging became a term for a person who gets into relationships with rich people just to leech money off them, the term was much more literal, referring to actual activities that resulted in the mining of gold. Whether it is done by the traditional panning method or via the humongous machines that large-scale operations use, gold mining always holds the promise of being a lucrative business for people with ambition and sufficient geological know-how, especially when they hit pay dirt at a place where gold deposits are abundant.
And for as long as gold is regarded as a precious metal, countries will consider the gold mining industry to be an important facet of their economies. In fact, we can say that the industry has become certified cash cow for certain countries, like South Africa, a country blessed with abundant gold deposits. Ever since formal statistics were established in the 1960s, South Africa had led all nations in gold production until the mid-2000s, and its output was at its highest in 1970, when the country extracted 1,000 metric tons of the precious metal.
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However, South Africa’s gold production has decreased almost every year since 1970, while other countries, particularly ones with large land areas and increasingly sophisticated mining operations, started overtaking the African nation. And one of those countries is Canada, now one of the top-five gold producing countries in the world as of last year, overtaking South Africa. And the gold business in Canada only stands to grow further. In March 2017, the Canadian government noted that the production value of gold, one of the country’s five most important mineral resources, increased by 8.8% in 2016, which maintained the precious metal’s status as a top-ranking commodity.
Canada is home to three of the top-10 gold mining companies in the world in terms of 2016 revenue, (including the #2 company), as well as five out of the top 20. Canada produced 160 metric tons of gold in 2016, good for fifth place among all countries. The rest of the top five were China (455 metric tons of gold produced), Australia (270 metric tons), Russia (270 metric tons), and the U.S (209 million tons). Together, the top-five gold producing countries accounted for 1,354 metric tons of gold extracted and refined in 2016, or about 44% of the total global output of 3,100 metric tons.
On a company-specific level, there are 30 Canadian gold mining companies that earned at least $100 million in revenue in 2016, proving further that Canada’s gold industry is lucrative. Among these miners, the top ten performers took in $23.23 billion in combined revenue last year.
Insider Monkey previously created a list of the 10 biggest gold mining companies in the world, which includes some Canadian gold miners.
As for the 10 largest Canadian gold mining companies, which included Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd (USA) (NYSE: AEM), Barrick Gold Corp (USA) (NYSE:ABX), B2Gold Corp (NYSEMKT:BTG), CENTERRA GOLD INC COM NPV (OTCMKTS:CAGDF), DETOUR GOLD CORPOR COM NPV (OTCMKTS:DRGDF), Goldcorp Inc. (USA) (NYSE:GG), IAMGOLD Corp (USA) (NYSE:IMG), Kinross Gold Corporation (USA) (NYSE:KGC), New Gold Inc. (USA) (NYSEMKT:NGD), and Yamana Gold Inc. (USA) (NYSE: YRI), they are ranked on this list according to their revenue during calendar year 2016.
Check out the list beginning on the next page.
