Table of Contents
The billionaire Lundin family has turned a CAD17.5 million ($12.9 million) bet on a gold mining company into nearly CAD1 billion ($739 million) in roughly two years, a return of 1,994%, according to Bloomberg.
The Swedish-Canadian family made the investment in March 2024, buying into Montage Gold Corp., a Toronto-listed company developing a gold mine in Ivory Coast. They already held a meaningful stake in Montage at the time. The fresh capital injection, which accounted for half of the new shares offered in that funding round, was meant to help push the flagship mine project toward production.
It worked. In January this year, Montage announced the Ivory Coast mine would start producing gold before the end of 2026, ahead of schedule. The stock responded sharply. Montage shares now trade at CAD14.66, up from the CAD0.70 per share the Lundins paid to expand their position two years ago.
The family's roughly 20% stake is now valued at about CAD1 billion. That lift has pushed their total estimated wealth to $18.1 billion.
The gain would have been impressive in any environment. In this one, it has been amplified by forces no one fully anticipated when the investment was made. Gold has surged to roughly $5,150 an ounce, well above the $3,000 average that Montage used in January to estimate the total value of its Ivory Coast reserve at $3.1 billion. That conservative assumption, applied across a 16-year mine life, now looks dramatically understated.
The metal's rise has been driven by a combination of factors piling up at once: market volatility tied to U.S. trade policy, political pressure on the Federal Reserve, and the kind of geopolitical uncertainty that sends money into safe-haven assets. The ongoing war with Iran has added another layer to that demand.
The Lundins did not stop at their March 2024 entry. When Montage ran a CAD180 million funding round in August that year, led by China's Zijin Mining Group Co., the family put in a further CAD45 million to defend their position from dilution. They remain Montage's largest shareholder, with 19.9% of outstanding shares.
The contrast with the rest of the family's gold holdings is stark. Lundin Gold Inc., another Toronto-listed company in the family portfolio, is up just 1.5% so far this year. Gold producers broadly have benefited from rising prices, but Montage has moved on a different scale. Since the January announcement on the mine's ahead-of-schedule progress, Montage shares have climbed 46%.
The Lundins have been in the mining business for three generations. The family story starts with Adolf Lundin, who spent the 1970s and 1980s chasing natural-resource opportunities from Qatar's gas fields to South Africa's gold mines. His grandsons, Jack and Adam, both in their 30s, now run Lundin Mining Corp., the family's largest operation and Vancouver's-headquartered company with interests spanning copper, zinc, nickel and gold. Jack serves as chief executive and Adam as chairman.
