Weekly Metals Mining Rundown and Peer Table - Free Edition for Week Ending 14 Mar 2025

This past week’s top & bottom metal price and mining company peer group movers include:

This past week’s top 40 performing metals mining stocks (out of Peer Table’s 430) include (share price rounding errors apply, as sourced from Google Finance):

Mining company announcements incorporated into this week’s Peer Table (resource updates, economic studies, changes in attributable project ownership) include:

• 12 Mar 2025 - Intermediate gold producer and silver producer Fortuna Mining (TSX:FVI) announced its annual reserves and resources update. Total Measured and Indicated (M&I) resources (inclusive of reserves) grew by ~2-3% to ~4.2 Moz AuEq (including Au and Ag, excluding minor Zn and Pb), which included an 11% decrease in reserves to 2.7 Moz AuEq, and a 36% increase in M&I resources exclusive of reserves to 1.5 Moz AuEq. Drop in reserves was due to depletion of 526 koz AuEq, partly offset by conversion of 204 koz resources (both excl. Zn and Pb). So while the past year’s mined reserves were not completely replaced, the total mined M&I resources were more than replaced (by infill drilling) - and those M&I resources should be easily converted to reserves later. Inferred gold-equivalent resources also increased (including from some newly discovered inferred resources) by 29% to 2.7 Moz AuEq (excl. Zn & Pb), leading to an increase in total mineral resources (excluding minor Zn and Pb) of ~7% to 5.93 Moz AuEq (also excluding Zn and Pb, at our estimated 3-month trailing average metal prices) or to 6.31 Moz AuEq including the Zn and Pb, also at our estimated 3-month trailing average metal prices. These 6.31 Moz AuEq of resources (88% from Au, 6% from Ag, rest Zn-Pb) trade at a FVI market cap/oz resource of US$257/oz AuEq - ranking near the upper-quartile-range (75th-percentile) of the intermediate gold producer peer group valuation range, and near the top of the silver producer peer group. This premium is expected, in part due to the typical premium on the silver share of its production (and its resources/reserves), and also in part due to its multiple highly-productive/strong-cash-flowing producing mines including in Latin America and Africa. This could make FVI either a good take-out target for a major looking to grow their cash flow, or perhaps even better for shareholders in the long-run would be if FVI leveraged its strong cash-flow and relatively high market cap/oz valuation to acquire a smaller-scale gold and/or silver producer with a larger/cheaper resource base in which it could invest & ramp production up (as FVI has done before, including years ago when it acquired/merged with African smaller-scale gold producer Roxgold).

• 10 Mar 2025 - Nickel, Cobalt, and PGM explorer Alaska Energy Metals (TSXV:AEMC) announced a significant increase in mineral resources for its flagship Nikolai nickel-polymetallic project in Alaska, which nearly doubled contained nickel-equivalent resources since the 2024 estimate to a whopping 29 Blbs NiEq (including nickel, copper, cobalt, gold, palladium, platinum, chromium, iron) grading 0.30% NiEq (excluding chromium and iron), 36% in the indicated category. Excluding chromium and iron and at our estimated 3-month trailing average metal prices, we estimate a 85% increase to the deposit size, to 21.1 Blbs NiEq (70% from Ni, 12% Cu, 8% Co, 8% Pd+Pt, 2% Au). AEMC traded down -2.3% following this news yesterday amid the broader equity selloff, outperforming our nickel explorer peer group median share price performance of -3.9% yesterday, suggesting a slight positive relative impact from this announcement. Nickel is largely out of favor due to its price trading near historical lows (at $7.45/lb Ni) , however the nickel price has been inching up in last few months suggesting that the tide may be starting to turn for the banged-up nickel sector. This huge nickel-polymetallic deposit (excluding chromium and iron) trades dirt cheap at a AEMC market cap/lb resource of $0.001/lb NiEq ($0.20/oz AuEq) - more than a 90% discount to our nickel explorer peer group median market cap/lb of $0.008/lb NiEq ($3.1/oz AuEq). This discount is perhaps due to the project’s relatively low grade of 0.3% NiEq. Although encouragingly, this grade is not out of line of other projects globally and should ultimately be economically open-pittable, especially given the project’s low strip ratio implied by the cross section shown in Figure 2 of the release for the project’s main Eureka deposit. More advanced nickel developer Canada Nickel Company (TSX:CNC)’s feasibility-stage Crawford project has a comparable (M&I) resource grade of 0.25% NiEq (including Ni, Co, Pd, Pt, and excluding iron, chromium, sulfur) and also a low open pit strip ratio of 2.3. AEMC’s Nikolai resource also has a solid 8% share of its metal value coming from cobalt, which is in-line with our cobalt explorer peer group median. Cobalt price has been rising more sharply than nickel lately. Cobalt price gains crushed those of all other major metals this past week, closing the week up some +39% to 15.22/lb Co. AEMC also trades at the bottom of this cobalt explorer peer group - at a week-ending market cap /lb resource of $0.001/lb CoEq ($0.20/oz AuEq) - an even steeper 96% to this cobalt explorer peer group median $0.021/lb CoEq ($5.6/oz AuEq).