Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Vault Minerals Limited
Vault Minerals is a gold mining company that digs up gold and gold-copper ore at its mines in Australia and Canada and sells the refined metal.
Vault Minerals is a gold miner. It pulls gold out of the ground at mines in Australia and Canada, turns the ore into bars of gold and containers of gold-copper concentrate, and sells them to refineries, smelters, and metals traders around the world. The price of gold is set by global markets, so Vault's job is really about digging it up cheaply and reliably.
The company was formerly known as Red 5 Limited, and it took the Vault Minerals name after combining with another Australian gold miner, Silver Lake Resources. That deal turned it into a mid-tier gold producer with a handful of operating mines rather than a single-asset story. Its main Australian operation is the Deflector mine in Western Australia, and it also has the Mount Monger and King of the Hills assets, the latter being a large open-pit mine near Leonora. Beyond Australia, it runs the Sugar Zone mine in Ontario, Canada. Gold miners like Vault are price takers, not price makers. They sell into a market where the going rate is the same for everyone, so their profit depends on the gap between what gold fetches and what it costs to extract an ounce. A high gold price makes even mediocre mines look good; a low one can make a well-run mine struggle. That is why the market watches a miner's "all-in sustaining cost" — the real cost of producing each ounce — almost as closely as it watches the gold price itself. Vault sits in the middle of a crowded field of Australian gold producers, competing for investor attention and capital against larger players like Northern Star Resources and Evolution Mining. Its edge, if it has one, is a portfolio of mines in friendly, stable jurisdictions rather than in riskier parts of the world, plus the scale that came from putting two companies together. The risks are the familiar ones for any miner: geology that disappoints, costs that creep up, and a gold price that can swing sharply.
The business throws off cash when gold prices are strong, and that cash gets ploughed back into keeping mines running, exploring for more ore to replace what is dug up, and paying down debt. Gold mining is a bit like running a farm where the crop price changes every day and the soil eventually runs out — you have to keep finding new ground to stay in business. Whether Vault does that well is the whole investment question.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026
Timeline
Red 5 Starts Out
In 1995, a small company called Red 5 Limited opened for business. It was just a name and an idea at that point. It would take a long time, and a lot of changes, before it became something big.
Buying the Leonora Assets
In 2017 the company picked up two key gold assets, Darlot and King of the Hills. Together they formed the base of what it called its Leonora asset base. In plain terms, the company now had real ground to dig gold from.
Adding Doray
Two years later, the company bought Doray. That added more gold assets to its growing collection, making the business bigger and less dependent on any single mine.
A Canadian Detour
In 2022 it bought the Sugar Zone, a gold operation in Canada. Suddenly the company was not just an Australian gold miner. It had a foothold on the other side of the world.
Red 5 Merges with Silver Lake
In June 2024, Red 5 merged with Silver Lake Resources. This was the big one: it paired the King of the Hills asset with Silver Lake's money and mining know-how. The result was a larger, more diversified gold producer, the kind of company that can survive the ups and downs of the gold price.
The Name Becomes Vault Minerals
Soon after the merger, the company retired the Red 5 name. In September 2024 it became Vault Minerals Limited. A new name for a company that had outgrown its old one.
A Strong Year and the First Dividend
By its 2026 financial year, the company was producing hundreds of thousands of ounces of gold and bringing in close to two billion dollars in sales. It was sitting on a big pile of cash and bullion, and it had no debt. For the first time, shareholders got paid a dividend: 7 cents a share.
Genesis Comes Knocking
Then came a bidding fight. Vault shareholders almost unanimously backed a merger with Genesis Minerals, and Genesis had outbid an earlier suitor, Regis Resources. The combined company was expected to become Australia's third-largest gold producer, with annual production of roughly 625,000 to 675,000 ounces.