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Endeavour Silver released its production results for both Q4 2014 and 2014 as a whole on Monday, and received a warm response from investors. The company’s share price ended the day up 9.44 percent on the TSX, at $3.13, and up 9.17 percent on the NYSE, at $2.62.
Endeavour Silver (TSX:EDR,NYSE:EXK) released its production results for both Q4 2014 and 2014 as a whole on Monday, and received a warm response from investors. The company’s share price ended the day up 9.44 percent on the TSX, at $3.13, and up 9.17 percent on the NYSE, at $2.62.
During the fourth quarter, Endeavour’s three Mexican mines achieved record silver production of 2,009,172 ounces, up 4 percent from the year-ago quarter. For the full year, the mines delivered 7,212,074 ounces of silver, 6 percent more than in 2013, bringing the company to its 10th year in a row of increased silver production.
By contrast, gold production saw a 14-percent decline in Q4, coming in at 15,127 ounces, while for the full year it sank 17 percent, to 62,895 ounces. Silver equivalent production for 2014 came to a total of 11.6 million ounces at a silver:gold ratio of 70:1.
Bradford Cooke, CEO and director of Endeavour, is as pleased as investors with the results. “Endeavour delivered new records for quarterly and annual silver production from our mining operations in 2014, led by record performance of the Guanaceví mine. We beat the high end of our silver production guidance by 5%, although our gold production fell short of guidance by 3%. Our operations group is to be commended for their stellar effort last year,” he said in a company statement.
Elaborating in a call to Silver Investing News, Cooke said that Guanacevi’s positive performance was driven by “a combination of higher grades than [the company] had planned on and higher recoveries than [it] had planned on.”
He also highlighted the El Cubo mine’s performance as key to the company’s overall success in 2014. “[El Cubo] had been subject to a two-year operating and capital turnaround program, and it looked like it was lagging this year — we had two soft quarters in particular, Q2 and Q3,” he said. Ultimately, however, in Q4 the mine “had a very rapid improvement in both tonnes and grades through the plant.”
There were no surprises from Bolanitos, Endeavour’s most profitable mine.
Endeavour hasn’t released its production guidance for 2015 — that’s coming in the next couple of weeks. But Cooke was able to say that the company’s Mexico-based San Sebastian deposit, which has been “an emerging new discovery” for the past couple of years, will remain a focus moving forward.
At the moment, said Cooke, Endeavour is pursuing “detailed permitting” at San Sebastian and “also doing rigorous economic studies to the level of prefeasibility study.” He added, “we do expect to get back drilling there later in the first quarter. Our goal at San Sebastian this year is to complete sufficient technical economic studies and permitting to go to the board sometime in the third quarter with a fully permitted and feasible project for a production decision.”
And of course remaining aware of the current price environment will be key. “We remain focused on optimizing our mining operations further in order to ensure that each mine generates positive operating cash flow through this current metal price downturn,” Cooke concludes in Monday’s release.
Securities Disclosure: I, Charlotte McLeod, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.