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ANGLOGOLD Ashanti CFO Gillian Doran said the gold miner would be disciplined about buying back its shares, arguing that repurchases should be opportunistic rather than simply another way of handing cash to shareholders.
Her comments at the Financial Times’ London Metals and Mining Summit came a day after BlackRock’s Evy Hambro criticised what he called “reckless capital allocation” by gold companies announcing large share buyback programmes.
AngloGold is among four major gold producers – together with Barrick Mining, Newmont and Gold Fields – that have approved buyback programmes worth about $12bn in total. BlackRock owns about 10% of AngloGold.
Doran said AngloGold had put in place a $2bn buyback programme over five years, but stressed that dividends remained its main way of returning cash.
“The buyback programme is another mechanism to return value, but we're very clear about the fact that it's got to be opportunistic. It's got to make sense,” she said.
“It can't just be a way to return value, particularly in an environment where you've got really high share prices at the moment.”
Doran added: “You know, it doesn't make sense that we would repurchase stock at those kind of very robust values.”
AngloGold’s primary shareholder return mechanism remained its dividend, set at 50% of free cash flow, she said. The company returned 62% of free cash flow to shareholders through dividends in 2025.
“We want to have a suite of mechanisms. Our primary mechanism is our is through our dividend, but we do want to be able to buy back stock if it's the right thing to do at a point in time,”
That emphasis closely echoes one element of Hambro’s criticism. He argued that miners should retain the flexibility to buy opportunistically instead of committing themselves to repurchases at elevated prices.
Said Hambro: “We’re very dismayed when companies announce big share buy-back plans when share prices are at their peak.”
He questioned why companies sometimes stopped buying after gold and their share prices fell sharply.
Doran said AngloGold was also balancing shareholder returns against investment in two large growth projects expected to enter production in the 2030s.
Its Arthur Gold Project in Nevada is being developed as a large, long-life gold operation, while Quebradona in Colombia is a proposed copper-gold mine. Both projects are expected to support the company's future growth, although Quebradona continues to face permitting, environmental and regulatory uncertainty.
“What we've tried to do on the capital allocation side is really build a level of resilience now in the balance sheet, to be able to fund that growth into the 2030s and still return to shareholders,” she Doran said.
AngloGold had also repaid debt early this year, strengthening its ability to fund those projects even under a stressed gold-price scenario.
“The buybacks is just a complementary mechanism to return value to shareholders,” Doran said.
“We have a responsibility to maintain robustness in this business for the long term, and so we don't want to be doing anything silly with these good times that we have in the cycle.”