AltynGold: a 3.5x gold miner with a 46% drawdown, flat volumes and a governance discount

AltynGold trades at 3.5x EV/EBITDA on a year in which revenue rose 82% and net debt fell to almost nothing. The eight listed gold producers we cover trade between 4.1x and 10.3x, with a median of 6.1x. The shares are also 46% below their January high. This note works through why the discount exists, what our model says the company is worth, and - because we found it while checking - why the number on our own card was wrong until this week.

The drawdown is the metal, not the company

Gold peaked at $5,484 an ounce on 28 January 2026 and trades near $4,240 today, down 23%. AltynGold peaked at 1,700p on exactly the same day and trades at 916p, down 46%. The ratio is the whole explanation: a producer whose all-in sustaining cost is $1,562 an ounce keeps the entire price move as margin, so the equity moves at roughly twice the metal in both directions. Nothing in the operating record broke between January and July. The stock rose eightfold from the start of 2025 and has since given back half of that gain - which is what leverage looks like when the underlying reverses.

2026 is a price year, not a volume year

This is the part most easily misread. Revenue in the first quarter of 2026 rose 122% year on year to $56.3m and the company sold 11,532 ounces at an average realised price of $4,809. But gold poured fell 4.6% to 10,664 ounces. The processing plant has been at its rated 1 million tonnes a year since the December 2024 upgrade, and guidance for the full year is 50,000-55,000 ounces against 53,852 delivered in 2025. Every dollar of growth this year comes from the metal price. The first-quarter grade dip - 1.73 g/t against 2.04 - was planned mining of the upper horizons to close a vertical gap in the main ore bodies; the company says it finished in April and grades are back on plan.

The balance sheet is the strongest part of the case

Net debt ended 2025 at $18.5m against EBITDA of $101.4m - 0.18x - after repaying $34.1m of borrowings during the year. Revenue was $175.4m, net profit $62.0m, and the average realised price including silver was $3,474 an ounce. All-in sustaining cost rose to $1,562 from $1,318, which is the one number worth watching: costs are climbing as the mine goes deeper, and a 19% annual increase compounds quickly. Against gold at $4,240 the margin is still roughly $2,700 an ounce. Reserves are not a constraint: the 2019 competent person's report puts proved reserves at 3.47 Moz and probable at 0.33 Moz, which is around seventy years at the current rate and still nearly forty at the 100koz the company aspires to.

What our model pays for - and what it does not

We value commodity producers by re-pricing the last reported year at a conservative metal price: the lower of spot and the midpoint between spot and the three-year average. For AltynGold that takes 2025 revenue of $175.4m, earned at $3,474 an ounce, and re-prices it at today's $4,240 for the spot case and at an inflation-adjusted three-year average for the cautious case. EBITDA comes out at $139.1m at spot, $87.0m on the three-year basis, and $113.0m on the conservative blend we actually use - against $101.4m reported.

Applied at an unchanged multiple, that gives a fair market value of $378m against $337m today, or 12% upside. It is worth being precise about what that number is and is not. It is not a re-rating call: the multiple in the calculation is the one the market pays right now, 3.51x. The 12% is simply the statement that gold at today's level, conservatively haircut, supports a slightly higher profit than 2025 delivered. A re-rating would be additional. The shares' own daily EV/EBITDA history since January 2024 runs from a lower quartile of 3.46x through a median of 3.94x to an upper quartile of 4.38x; at the median the shares are worth $427m, at the upper quartile $476m - 26% and 41% above today.

Two honest limits on that history. It covers two and a half years, not a gold cycle, so the quartiles describe how this share has been priced recently rather than through-cycle. And it is a thin book: three-month average volume is about 81,000 shares a day, roughly a million dollars, on a free float of 34%.

Why the multiple is 3.5x and not 8x

The gold producers we cover trade at a median of 6.1x EBITDA, from Solidcore at 4.1x to Genesis Minerals at 10.3x. AltynGold's discount is structural rather than a mispricing waiting to be corrected, and the components are identifiable. The company is controlled by one family: Kanat Assaubayev chairs the board and his sons Aidar and Sanzhar sit on it as chief executive and director. Free float is 34%. There is no dividend - the board says it continues to review a policy, balancing returns against the capital needed for the expansion. The listing sits on the London Stock Exchange's transition segment, outside the indices. And in its announcement of 1 June the board confirmed it had received questions about a preliminary request for an investigation arising from a family inheritance dispute involving one of its shareholders, stating that the matter does not concern the company and that it has been advised the underlying allegations are without merit. The shares slid from around 1,100p to 838p through June and July.

The catalyst is a capital-spending announcement, which cuts both ways

Management has said since April that it is finalising a second-stage expansion of Sekisovskoye to 2-2.5 million tonnes a year, which would take production above 100,000 ounces, and that it will update the market 'over the course of the Summer'. A separate production licence for the Teren-Sai deposit is expected by the end of 2026. This is the near-term binary. Doubling output changes what the company is, and the multiple with it. But no capital cost has been disclosed, no funding structure has been described, and a company with a 34% float and no dividend has obvious reasons to consider equity. Selling ahead of that announcement gives up the outcome that matters; buying ahead of it takes an undisclosed capital call on trust.

A correction to our own number

Until this week our card showed a potential of minus 25% for AltynGold. That was our error, and the cause is worth stating because it affected far more than one company. The model re-prices last year's revenue by the ratio of the spot metal price to a trailing-twelve-month average - but that average was anchored on the last completed calendar quarter, not on the year the revenue was actually earned in. AltynGold's latest reported year is 2025, earned at $3,474 an ounce, while the model was dividing spot by $4,246, the average of the twelve months to mid-2026. The gold leg therefore read 1.00x - 'gold has not moved' - instead of the true 1.24x, and the cautious leg cut revenue by 24% instead of 5%.

The price base is now averaged over each issuer's own reporting window. The same audit turned up three further defects of the same family, all from matching fiscal periods by the calendar year of their end date: the trailing-year roll-forward was pairing interim results with the wrong annual report for every issuer whose year does not end in December, half-year rows were being derived against the following December's interim, and the same fault sat in the builder that produces the historical multiple. Corrected figures are live across our South African, Australian, Indonesian and Kazakh coverage. Where the reported window is now more than 450 days old, we withhold the potential rather than publish one computed from stale financials.

Bottom line

AltynGold is cheap for reasons that are visible and unlikely to disappear on their own: family control, a thin float, no dividend, a jurisdiction that carries a discount, and an open governance question the board has addressed but not closed. Against that it earns a $2,700 margin on every ounce, carries almost no debt, has seventy years of reserves and is about to describe a plan that would double its output. The valuation case is a modest 12% at an unchanged multiple and 26-41% if the shares return to their own recent range. What it is not is an earnings-growth story: volumes are flat this year by the company's own guidance, and everything above the flat line is the gold price. Size the position as leverage on gold with a governance discount attached, because that is what it is.