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Wheaton Precious Metals Corp.
Wheaton Precious Metals provides upfront cash to miners and gets the right to buy future silver and gold at a steep discount.
Wheaton Precious Metals is not a mining company. It does not own mines, run drills, or employ miners underground. Instead, it is one of the world's biggest precious metals streaming companies: it hands a miner a large pile of cash upfront, and in exchange gets the right to buy a slice of that mine's future silver or gold production at a fixed, very low price.
That upfront payment is the whole trick. A miner building a new mine often needs money and cannot easily raise it, so it sells Wheaton a chunk of its future output at a bargain price. Wheaton then turns around and sells that metal at the normal market price, pocketing the difference. If the mine costs more to build than planned, that is the miner's problem, not Wheaton's. The company also holds royalty agreements, which pay it a share of a mine's revenue without any obligation to chip in for costs. The business is deliberately spread across many mines and many countries, so no single operation can sink it. Wheaton's partners include some of the largest gold miners in the world, and its deals have touched mines across the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Because it pays most of its costs upfront and then buys metal cheaply for decades, the cash keeps flowing even when metal prices dip, though lower prices do shrink the pile. Rising gold and silver prices have been a strong tailwind in recent years.
The company does not spend its cash on building mines. It returns a big share to shareholders through dividends, pays down debt, and keeps hunting for the next streaming deal. One quirk worth knowing: it was founded as Silver Wheaton and spent years as a pure silver play before rebranding as Wheaton Precious Metals in 2017 to reflect its growing gold business. The name changed; the model did not.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026