BARRICK Mining Corp is pivoting away from riskier operating environments and returning to mergers and acquisitions, said Bloomberg News on Thursday citing a letter to shareholders from the group’s chairman, John Thornton.
The strategy represents a departure from the project-focused growth that defined the previous decade, much of it in Africa and Asia, the newswire said.
The letter is Thornton’s first public statement since the Canadian miner replaced long-serving CEO Mark Bristow in September and announced plans to spin off its leading North American assets.
Thornton said the company’s shares had long been undervalued and that a separately listed North American vehicle would become the world’s most compelling pure-gold investment.
Barrick is preparing to list a new entity containing its Nevada joint venture, the Fourmile discovery and a Dominican Republic mine, with the process targeted for completion by end-2026. The restructuring follows a difficult operational period that saw 2025 gold output fall 17% to 3.26 million ounces, the lowest in at least 25 years.
Mark Hill was appointed CEO in February after Bristow’s abrupt departure, which followed a military government’s seizure of Barrick’s key Mali mine. Hill has since overhauled the senior leadership team and restructured regional operations.
Any acquisition would be Barrick’s first significant deal since its 2019 merger with Randgold Resources, which originally brought Bristow to the combined company, said Bloomberg News. An informal approach for First Quantum Minerals in 2023 came to nothing. Thornton said future targets would be confined to so-called tier-one assets — long-life, low-cost mines.
The company last week flagged sharply higher costs at its Pakistan copper project, where security concerns had already slowed progress, and said it was scaling back work there.
