How it started
History
The company was founded in 1988 as Goldpac Investments. Between 1994 and 1999, it operated as Brimstone Gold Corp., a consulting and investment company in the gold mining industry. The company was renamed Foxpoint Resources Ltd. as it sought to acquire and develop its own gold mining property.
In 2001, the Vancouver-based Foxpoint Resources purchased several mining properties from Kinross Gold around Kirkland Lake, Ontario. The $5 million purchase included several former mines: Macassa Mine, Lakeshore Mine, Wright Hargreaves and Teck Hughes. The company renamed itself again as Kirkland Lake Gold and re-commissioned the underground Macassa Mine. As it continued new exploration, it was able to begin extracting gold from the mine in 2003.
Kirkland Lake Gold focused on developing its Macassa mine until 2015 when it acquired St. Andrew Goldfields with its three mines (the Holt Complex) about 100 km from Kirkland Lake, in an all-stock deal worth $178 million.
In 2016, pressure from activist shareholders seeking more aggressive expansion led to changes in management to expand the company's holdings. Later that year, the company acquired Vancouver-based Newmarket Gold Inc., which owned the Cosmo mine in the Northern Territory and the Fosterville and Stawell Gold Mines in Victoria, Australia, for $1.01-billion in stock. Kirkland Lake Gold listed stocks on the Australian Securities Exchange effective November 30, 2017.
On the Toronto Stock Exchange, Kirkland Lake Gold was promoted to the S&P/TSX 60 index effective September 23, 2019. Within a few months, the company acquired Detour Gold in a $4.9-billion purchase.
From Wikipedia’s article on Kirkland Lake Gold, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3