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DECEMBER 7—20, 2020 / VOL. 106 ISSUE 25 / GLOBAL MINING NEWS · SINCE 1915 / $5.25 / WWW.NORTHERNMINER.COM
Mark Bristow on how to build a business INTERVIEW
| Culture and leadership are core principles at Barrick
BY TRISH SAYWELL
I
tsaywell@northernminer.com
n an interview in September with Ernst & Young, Barrick Gold’s (TSX: ABX; NYSE: GOLD) CEO Mark Bristow noted that all 37 partners at the company are required to be heavily invested as shareholders, which means they must own stock on a sliding scale up to five times their gross salary before they can realize any stock incentives. The Northern Miner picked up on that discussion recently in an exclusive interview with the mining executive about the history of that philosophy at the company he founded, Randgold Resources, and how he and Barrick’s executive chairman, John Thornton, have institutionalized that thinking at the new Barrick. This is an edited version of that conversation.
TNM: Can you tell me about your philosophy on management and ownership. MARK BRISTOW: There’s a long
history here and it’s an interesting thing you picked up. It goes back a long way. Barrick back in its early days when it was created by Peter Munk and Bob Smith, who was the
Mark Bristow visits geologists at the Kibali mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
operator, was a very entrepreneurial company. It did some amazing stuff and built quite quickly, and it was all about ownership, small office,
corporate decisions made with real knowledge of the assets, etcetera and so it was run by owners even then, and they created wealth. When I set up Randgold as a private company in 1994, we set out to build a real, what I call sustainably profitable mining business, which is a bit of an oxymoron, and definitely was back then. I started it with a single employee and my team, which is still part of the now merged team, most of those people grew with me and were naturally owners. Barrick went off-piste a little bit over the last while, certainly around the last big gold market, and when John Thornton took over the reins, he introduced a “back to the future” strategy — that’s what he used to call it — to try to get Barrick back to where it came from. And core to that, coming from Goldman Sachs, John introduced a policy of forced ownership all the time you were employed at Barrick. That can be a good thing and can also be bad because you’re creating value and you can’t access any portion of the value you’re creating. But up until 2018, when I took over the reins, it was probably a good thing because it forced people to focus on business as owners. One of the things it did was to deal with debt and crises by sweating the assets, unlike many other resource companies that were managed by the over-exuberance of the last peak gold price and then
BARRICK GOLD
ended up issuing more equity to solve the problem. TNM: Can you tell me more about
how you set that up at Randgold?
BRISTOW: For me, that concept of ownership and entrepreneurship was really a base that we started out with at Randgold. Our remuneration at Randgold, salary wise, was low down in the quartiles, it wasn’t at the top end of the market, but the equity incentives were high and even then, we had to keep stock. It was a five-year process before you could access your long-term stock incentives, and that built ownership. So when we put the companies together, John had introduced this concept of a partnership idea, and at Randgold I always had had a longterm equity incentive program that went very deep into the organization. So what I did was marry the Barrick concept of ownership with Randgold’s concept of ownership, and what we settled on was that even John, as chairman, has to continue to own at least four times his salary in stock. We had these same rules at Randgold and I have to own ten times my salary in stock. Of course John owns 30 times his salary in stock at the current share price, and I own over 90 times. So what we did then together with our remuneration committee, was we restructured it. We’ve got 37 partners
NORTHERN DYNASTY DENIED KEY PERMITS FOR PEBBLE / 3
and they are expected to have up to five times their gross salary in Barrick shares or the equivalent of shares. One thing Barrick does which is unique, See BRISTOW / 6 PM40069240