The major silver miners’ stocks have been largely abandoned this year, spiraling to brutal multi-year lows. Such miserable technicals have exacerbated the extreme bearishness plaguing this tiny contrarian sector. While profitable silver mining is challenging at today’s exceedingly-low silver prices, these miners are chugging along. Their recently-reported Q3’18 results show their earnings are ready to soar as silver recovers.
Four times a year publicly-traded companies release treasure troves of valuable information in the form of quarterly reports. Companies trading in the States are required to file 10-Qs with the US Securities and Exchange Commission by 40 calendar days after quarter-ends. Canadian companies have similar requirements at 45 days. In other countries with half-year reporting, many companies still partially report quarterly.
Unfortunately the universe of major silver miners to analyze and invest in is pretty small. Silver mining is a tough business both geologically and economically. Primary silver deposits, those with enough silver to generate over half their revenues when mined, are quite rare. Most of the world’s silver ore formed alongside base metals or gold. Their value usually well outweighs silver’s, relegating it to byproduct status.
The Silver Institute has long been the authority on world silver supply-and-demand trends. It published its latest annual World Silver Survey covering 2017 in mid-April. Last year only 28% of the silver mined around the globe came from primary silver mines! 36% came from primary lead/zinc mines, 23% copper, and 12% gold. That’s nothing new, the silver miners have long produced less than a third of world mined supply.
It’s very challenging to find and develop the scarce silver-heavy deposits supporting primary silver mines. And it’s even harder forging them into primary-silver-mining businesses. Since silver isn’t very valuable, most silver miners need multiple mines in order to generate sufficient cash flows. Traditional major silver miners are increasingly diversifying into gold production at silver’s expense, chasing its superior economics.
So there aren’t many major silver miners left out there, and their purity is shrinking. The definitive list of these companies to analyze comes from the most-popular silver-stock investment vehicle, the SIL Global X Silver Miners ETF. In mid-November at the end of Q3’s earnings season, SIL’s net assets were running 6.6x greater than its next-largest competitor’s. So SIL continues to dominate this tiny niche contrarian sector.
While SIL has its flaws, it’s the closest thing we have to a silver-stock index. As ETF investing continues to eclipse individual-stock picking, SIL inclusion is very important for silver miners. It grants them better access to the vast pools of stock-market capital. Differential SIL-share buying by investors requires this ETF’s managers to buy more shares in its underlying component companies, bidding their stock prices higher.
In mid-November as the silver miners were finishing reporting their Q3’18 results, SIL included 23 “Silver Miners”. Unfortunately the great majority aren’t primary silver miners, most generate well under half their revenues from silver. That’s not necessarily an indictment against SIL’s stock picking, but a reflection of the state of this industry. There aren’t enough significant primary silver miners left to fully flesh out an ETF.
This disappointing reality makes SIL somewhat problematic. The only reason investors would buy SIL is they want silver-stock exposure. But if SIL’s underlying component companies generate just over a third of their sales from silver mining, they aren’t going to be very responsive to silver price moves. And most of that ETF capital intended to go into primary silver miners is instead diverted into byproduct silver miners.
So silver-mining ETFs sucking in capital investors thought they were allocating to real primary silver miners effectively starves them. Their stock prices aren’t bid high enough to attract in more investors, so they can’t issue sufficient new shares to finance big silver-mining expansions. This is exacerbating the silver-as-a-byproduct trend. Only sustained much-higher silver prices for years to come could reverse this.
Silver miners’ woes are really exacerbated by silver’s worst performance in decades. In mid-November silver sunk to a 2.8-year low of $13.99. That naturally dragged down SIL to a similar 2.7-year low. But relative to gold which usually drives it, silver was faring far worse. The Silver/Gold Ratio sunk to 85.9x in mid-November, meaning it took almost 86 ounces of silver to equal the value of a single ounce of gold.
The SGR hadn’t been lower, or silver hadn’t been more undervalued relative to gold, since all the way back in March 1995! That’s pretty much forever from a markets perspective. With silver languishing at an exceedingly-extreme 23.7-year low relative to gold, it’s hard to imagine it doing much worse. So the silver miners are weathering one of the toughest environments they’ve ever seen, which we have to keep in mind.
Every quarter I dig into the latest results from the major silver miners of SIL to get a better understanding of how they and this industry are faring fundamentally. I feed a bunch of data into a big spreadsheet, some of which made it into the table below. It includes key data for the top 17 SIL component companies, an arbitrary number that fits in this table. That’s a commanding sample at 96.9% of SIL’s total weighting!
While most of these top 17 SIL components had reported on Q3’18 by mid-November, not all had. Some of these major silver miners trade in the UK or Mexico, where financial results are only required in half-year increments. If a field is left blank in this table, it means that data wasn’t available by the end of Q3’s earnings season. Some of SIL’s components also report in gold-centric terms, excluding silver-specific data.
The first couple columns of this table show each SIL component’s symbol and weighting within this ETF as of mid-November. While most of these stocks trade on US exchanges, some symbols are listings from companies’ primary foreign stock exchanges. That’s followed by each miner’s Q3’18 silver production in ounces, along with its absolute year-over-year change. Next comes this same quarter’s gold production.
Nearly all the major silver miners in SIL also produce significant-to-large amounts of gold! That’s truly a double-edged sword. While gold really stabilizes and boosts silver miners’ cash flows, it also retards their stocks’ sensitivity to silver itself. So the next column reveals how pure these elite silver miners are, approximating their percentages of Q3’18 revenues actually derived from silver. This is calculated two ways.
