The gold market has been struggling mightily since the dawn of the world’s recovery from the Great Recession. While it’s seen significant growth over the last six months with uncertainty reigning in equity markets, gold prices are still down 11.65% over he last five years.
Goldcorp (NYSE:GG), a major producer of the precious metal, has taken quite a hit from the weakening market, so much that it recently received another in a long line of downgrades, this time from Moody’s.
The credit rating agency downgraded Goldcorp’s unsecured rating from Baa2 to Baa3, just one step above speculative grade, otherwise known as junk status.
“The downgrade of Goldcorp’s rating reflects the deterioration of its profitability and coverage metrics and our expectation they will remain weak through 2016 combined with minimal free cash flow generation at a $1,100/oz gold price,” said Jamie Koutsoukis, Moody’s Vice President, Senior Analyst.
Poor management
A few things Moody’s acknowledges that Goldcorp does well includes its “large scale, good mine diversity, sizeable gold reserves, favorable geopolitical risk and low leverage.” Plus, it has excellent liquidity with about $326 million in cash.
Despite all that, the company is plagued with poor profitability, production declines and major challenges at executing in several of its contracted mines. And because of the expectation that production will continue to be an issue in the near future, improving profitability is going to be a challenge.
It seems the company’s new CEO David Garofalo is on board with the idea that the main problem is poor management. He recently announced a series of senior management changes, moving forward with his strategy to decentralize head office control and giving mine managers more accountability.
Garofalo also seems to be putting a clamp down on the company’s acquisition interests. Having been a serial acquirer over the last ten years, Goldcorp now makes it clear that it sees more value in organic growth projects rather than mergers and acquisitions.
