Newmont Posts Earnings Beat Despite Gold’s Volatility. The Stock Falls Anyway.

The gold miner beats earnings and revenue expectations for the third quarter. (Dado Galdieri/Bloomberg)

Key Points

• Newmont reports third-quarter adjusted earnings of $1.71 a share on revenue of $5.5 billion, exceeding analysts’ expectations.
• Newmont’s shares have risen sharply this year despite recent volatility.
• Market-wide spot gold prices increased 17% during the third quarter, reaching a record above $4,350 per troy ounce.

Gold miner Newmont reported better-than-expected quarterly profit and revenue, as well as “meaningful” improvement in the cost metrics around its full-year outlook, despite high expectations amid volatile gold prices. The stock fell sharply anyway.

The Denver-based miner posted third-quarter adjusted earnings of $1.71 a share and net income of $1.8 billion. Analysts expected earnings of $1.44 a share. Revenue increased 20% to $5.5 billion, surpassing projections for $5.2 billion.

Shares were down 6.9% to $82.80 in premarket trading Friday. The stock has gained 139% this year and 80.5% over the past 12 months.

Newmont’s average realized gold price was $3,539 per ounce in the third quarter, compared with $2,518 per ounce in the year-ago third-quarter.

Market-wide spot gold increased 17% between the start and end of the third quarter. It’s been a wilder ride since then: Spot gold prices rose to a record above $4,350 a troy ounce on Monday before tumbling on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Front month Comex gold for October delivery closed up 2% on Thursday, at $4,125.50 a troy ounce, snapping a two-session losing streak and ending up at the sixth-highest settle value this year, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

However, gold futures were down again on Friday, falling 1.8% to $4,069.40 an ounce.

“Newmont delivered a robust third quarter performance, producing approximately 1.4 million attributable gold ounces and generating a third-quarter record of $1.6 billion in free cash flow, marking the fourth consecutive quarter with over $1 billion in free cash flow,” Newmont CEO Tom Palmer said in a statement.

“We are making significant progress on the cost savings initiatives announced at the beginning of the year, enabling us to meaningfully improve our 2025 guidance for several cost metrics, while maintaining our outlook for production and unit costs in a rising gold price environment,” Palmer added.

With gold prices fluctuating wildly this week, Newmont’s earnings report became a bigger event than even its own executives may have anticipated.

Gold’s price volatility weren’t reflected in Thursday’s numbers, of course, but it has impacted Newmont’s stock. Shares fell 9% on Tuesday, as the stock had its worst session since Oct. 24, 2024.

Newmont doesn’t provide guidance on the direction of gold prices—something it mostly doesn’t control—but it did maintain its full-year outlook for production and unit costs. The company also declared a 25-cents per-share dividend, payable on Dec. 22, to shareholders of record at the close of business on Nov. 26.

Current Chief Operating Officer Natascha Viljoen will become CEO next January, after Palmer retires at the end of 2025.

Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.com