Vancouver – Bruised by the fallout of the Sino-Forest (TRE-T) debacle, Silvercorp Metals (SVM-T) has since regained some lost ground after several resource and reserve updates and a share buy-back.
Between July 5 and 7 the Vancouver-based and China-focused company reported a resource estimated for its BYP gold-lead-zinc project in Chinan’s Hunan province, updated the numbers at its three mines in the Ying silver-lead-zinc mining district in Henan province, and updated the resource at its Silvertip silver-lead-zinc property in British Columbia.
At BYP the resource was based on roughly 36,000 metres of drilling from 1992 and recent underground channel sampling and came in at 2.1 million indicated tonnes grading 3.27 grams gold per tonne for 225,400 contained oz. gold plus 2.8 million inferred tonnes grading 2.29 grams gold, both using a 1 gram gold cutoff. The lead-zinc resource was 8.3 million inferred tonnes grading 1.34% lead and 3.42% zinc with a 3% lead-zinc cut-off.
The company estimates that the Silvertip project has 4.2 million indicated tonnes grading 261.3 grams silver per tonne, 4.87% lead and 8.5% zinc for 35 million oz. silver, 203,000 tonnes lead and 354,000 tonnes zinc, and an inferred resource of 908,000 tonnes grading 278.2 grams silver, 4.8% lead and 9.6% lead.
Finally at the Ying district, Silvercorp estimates that combined, the three mines contain proven and probable reserves of 6.6 million tonnes grading 273 grams silver, 4.69% lead, 1.32% zinc and some copper-gold for roughly 58 million oz. silver, 309,000 tonnes lead, 87,000 tonnes zinc, 17,000 oz. gold and 2,000 tonnes copper.
The wave of updates comes roughly two weeks after the company received approval to buy back up to 10 million shares over the next year, representing almost 6% of its 175 million shares outstanding.
Silvercorp stated it undertook the buyback “because it believes that prevailing market conditions have resulted in Silvercorp’s shares being undervalued relative to the immediate and long-term value of Silvercorp’s portfolio of producing and development properties in China and Canada.”
The company’s share price ended May at $10.82 before the Muddy Waters report about Sino-Forest broke, which heightened scepticism about China-based companies. Silvercorp’s share price proceeded to drop to a low of $7.91 on June 17 when it announced the share buyback plan and successfully ended the decline.
On July 8, following the resource updates, the company closed at $10.33 having gained $1.13 over four days. The rebound puts Silvercorp close to where it was before the early June drop, but still a far cry from the peak of $15.60 it hit in early April when the price of silver itself peaked at US$48.70 per oz. The silver price declined sharply in early May along with Silvercorp’s share price, hitting almost US$32 per oz. silver, while on July 8 the price closed at US$36.71 per oz.
Hi,
I’m fairly new to the resource sector and when reading the different articles I find that sometimes the numbers are quoted grams per tonne but provide no total numbers i.e. Indicated X number of oz’s.
For example in the article on SVM-the review of two of their sites are quoted as grams per tonne….but for Ying it gives 58 milions oz of silver.
It woud nice if the quotes could give the total number of oz’s (for silver and gold) vs grams per tonne.
Thanks, Jeff