Hecla Mining CompanyHL
Recorded

Hecla Mining Company Mining Forum Americas 2026

Review the key takeaways and the transcript of this earnings call.

Period 2026Duration19 minParticipants1

Transcript

Preview the first fifteen paragraphs, organized by speaker.

Rob KrcmarovPresident and CEO

Talking about why we think this is a really compelling time to own our stock. Before I get going, just a quick note. I will be making some forward-looking statements. I will be talking about our outlook and growth plans. Those obviously involve risks and uncertainties, and the actual results could differ. I will also reference some non-GAAP measures like all-in sustaining costs and free cash flow, and full reconciliations are in the appendix, and I encourage you to have a look in our SEC filings. Why do we call ourselves North America's premium silver producer? It really comes down to these six things. First, 135-year legacy. We are the longest listed mining company on the New York Stock Exchange. As I said, we have been around for 135 years. I think this speaks to our resilience because we are generally thoughtful.

Rob KrcmarovPresident and CEO

For me personally, being a part of 135-year history, I take that quite seriously because there are generations of miners and people who have held our stock that we are responsible for and accountable to. Second, we operate in the very best jurisdictions. Every one of our operations and all of our projects, they are all in Canada and the U.S. And so as someone said last week, we do not have to worry about coups, corruption or cartels. Third, we are silver-focused, peer-leading silver exposure, both in terms of revenue as well as reserves. Fourth is our reserve dominance. In fact, our average reserve mine life is 72% longer than the peer group average. Fifth is the project momentum. We are surfacing some real value through some really robust organic projects, and I will get to those in a moment. And sixth is cost excellence.

Rob KrcmarovPresident and CEO

We were the lowest cost producer of our peer group in 2025. That is on an all-in sustaining cost basis, and that protects our margins. If you put those six things together, you are really getting a company with scale, with longevity, financial discipline, and sitting in the best jurisdictions in the world for mining. And what that all boils down to is really longest lived, lowest risk, purest silver story in the sector. Our growth is organic by design. Every project and every mine that we sit in, obviously, we already own, we understand it deeply. So there is no new geological risk. There is no integration risk. There is no bidding war on someone else's discovery. We stage the capital for all of our projects and mines as each project earns it, funding the next phase only once it creates our investment criteria.

Rob KrcmarovPresident and CEO

That does not mean we have closed the door on acquisitions, obviously. If the right opportunity meets our criteria, we will look at it. But our growth, it really just does not depend on it. We have a healthy organic growth business, and I think that is what makes Hecla the premier silver producer in North America. Our three operating mines, they sit in the upper northwest part of our continent. We have Greens Creek in Alaska, Lucky Friday in the Silver Valley in northern Idaho. That is a tremendous district. That has produced 1.2 billion ounces. I think it is really underappreciated, the silver potential there. And that is not far from our head office in Coeur d'Alene. And our newest mine is Keno Hill, which is up in the Yukon. Around those, we also hold a deep portfolio of exploration projects in Nevada, Montana, Colorado and Washington State.

Rob KrcmarovPresident and CEO

Together, this makes us the largest silver producer in the United States and Canada. Here's one way of seeing our advantage here. This is perhaps a little bit complicated slide, but let me explain. The key point here is that Hecla's average reserve mine life is 13.3 years. Again, 72% longer than the industry peer year average, which is around about 7.7 years. If you have a look at the chart across the bottom, the solid lines, the solid blue and the solid gray, they're the silver mines, and the ones in white are gold mines. Our reserve base, as you can see, simply runs deeper and longer than any other silver producer, and that means there's a lower replacement risk. It's more predictable long-term production. We can plan long term. We have stability, and we can see over the horizon longer than anyone else.

Rob KrcmarovPresident and CEO

It gives us more clarity so that we can make capital allocation decisions. This chart plots our mines by jurisdictional risk on the y-axis and the silver equivalent grade on the x-axis across the bottom. Obviously you want to be in the top right-hand corner. The size of the bubble reflects the scale of the asset. So you can see where our three assets sit. Really, I don't think any of our peers can put that combination together across their own portfolio. I think this matters just beyond this chart here. So lower jurisdictional risk, it means security in our future cash flows and our production. I think that's one of the reasons why Hecla deserves a premium valuation. As I said, we don't have to worry about things like coups, corruption and cartels.

Rob KrcmarovPresident and CEO

In the second quarter of 2026, silver made up about 68% of our Q2 revenue from silver, and that's the highest exposure amongst our peers. In the first quarter, it was above 72%. So if you want silver exposure in your portfolio, this is about as pure as it gets. I think as you can see on the y-axis there, our reserve base tells the same story. It's very, very heavily weighted towards silver. With oil prices obviously being topical and making headlines, it's quite a discussion point. I think it's worth addressing our exposure to it. Fuel really just made up 3% of our consolidated Q2 2026 costs. Swings in oil prices, they barely affect us. Labor is really our largest and probably most predictable cost input, and that's the one that we watch most closely.

Rob KrcmarovPresident and CEO

On a 2025 all-in sustaining cost basis, Hecla sits at the low end of the silver cost curve. We were the lowest cost producer in our peer group last year, and that's really an advantage that's tied closely to the quality and the grade of our mines. We're guiding to 15.1-16.1 million ounces of silver production in 2026. From there, the nearest upside comes from two projects at Greens Creek, the pyrite concentrate circuit and the tailings reprocessing project. More on that in the next slide. Looking further out, we see a real path to being a +20 million ounce silver producer. The medium-term growth coming from the continued ramp-up at Keno Hill and the potential restart of the historic Midas mine and any satellite resources in Nevada. Longer term, there's more potential upside from a possible Keno Hill expansion.

Rob KrcmarovPresident and CEO

We have a permitted mill constraint at 440 tons per day, but the actual mill itself is capable of significantly more than that, probably close to 50% past that. That is longer term. There is also the Aurora deposit. That is one of our VPs' favorite projects. He is very excited about the potential there, as well as Hollister in Nevada. This is basically a multi-year, multi-project pipeline, and every ounce of it is organic. Like I said, we can control it. We can control the investment decisions and it is really meaningful growth potential that is stacked on top of an already long-lived, stable production base and long reserve life. Let me give you a bit more color on our three organic growth projects.

Rob KrcmarovPresident and CEO

At Greens Creek, the pyrite concentrate circuit, that is potentially going to produce something like about 1 million to 1.2 million ounces a year and about 10,000 to 15,000 ounces of gold once that is fully ramped up. We are targeting first production in the fourth quarter of 2027 and into perhaps the first half of 2028, with about a year to ramp that up. That is really low complexity. It is low CapEx, super high returns. We are very excited about that. Also, Greens Creek, we are evaluating the processing of dry stack tailings. These are not wet tails in a tailings dam. You have seen how they collapse unfortunately. This is basically a pile of dry sand that is sitting on the surface. What we have there is 10.6 million tons holding roughly 51 million ounces of silver, 600,000 ounces of gold, plus a bunch of other critical metals.

Rob KrcmarovPresident and CEO

At mid-year prices this year, that is worth roughly about $6.1 billion in the ground. That is obviously before costs. If you do the math on the tons versus the contained ounces, you can see why we are excited here. That is a lot of metal sitting in a pile on the surface about a mile from our port, that we have already mined once. An update on that. Phase 3 metallurgical test work, that wrapped up in August, and we are waiting on those results now. At Midas in Nevada, we have a fully permitted mill. It is 1,200 tons per day. We have an empty tailings dam. It has got capacity for around about 15 years. We are planning on doing regular exploration updates through the rest of this year and into 2027 as we evaluate what that is going to look like, what a restart might look like there.

Rob KrcmarovPresident and CEO

The common thread across all three of these projects here is they are all relatively low capital intensity to execute. Let us just dive into a couple of our operations here. Greens Creek is our cornerstone mine. It has been generating free cash flow for us for multiple decades. In fact, from 2006, you can see in that line chart at the bottom there, it has generated $2.4 billion of free cash flow. It is a phenomenal mine. In the second quarter of 2026, Greens Creek produced 2.1 million ounces of silver and just over 14,000 ounces of gold and generated nearly $130 million of free cash flow at an all-in sustaining cost of negative $10.71 an ounce, and that is after by-product credits. It sits in the best 15th percentile of the primary silver cost curve, and it carries a 12-year reserve life.

Rob KrcmarovPresident and CEO

In fact, it's pretty much had a 12-year reserve life for the last 35 years or so. We're also advancing that pyrite concentrate circuit and the tailings reprocessing that I mentioned on the last slide. Lucky Friday is our second cornerstone mine. Our Underhand Closed Bench mining technique has this mine positioned really for its best decade in its 80-year history. This has been producing more or less semi-continuously with a few periods of pauses, and really the next decade looks fantastic. We adopted the Underhand Closed Bench mining technique primarily because this is a deep and it's a seismic mine, and it was primarily for safety. But it came with a real bonus. Production really increased. It's almost double what it was in previous decades. In Q2, Lucky Friday delivered a record 1.5 million ounces of silver. That was in Q2. That's not an isolated quarter.

Rob KrcmarovPresident and CEO

If you look back last year, this mine set successive milling records throughout 2025, and it closed the year with a record 5.3 million ounces of production. Lucky Friday generated over $87 million of free cash flow at a little over $17, all-in sustaining costs of $17 an ounce. The surface cooling project, which we've been building out for the last year and a half or two, that's tracking for completion this month. That's going to set up our long-term future. It's going to make conditions working underground more pleasant. It is fairly hot. You can assume that there's probably going to be some productivity gains, but you can't quantify that, because you can imagine working in a hot environment compared to something that's a little bit more pleasant.

Rob KrcmarovPresident and CEO

It also sets us up for the long-term future, so that as we continue to mine this fabulous ore body at depth, which has not been closed off at all, and in fact, there's been no exploration in the district since about 2011. This is setting us up for future success capacity out to 2044 through a three-phase plan, and the first phase is due in 2028. The reserve mine life here is 15 years. Keno is our newest mine. That's located up in the Yukon. That's still going through a phase of investment and ramp-up. In Q2, it produced about 600,000 ounces of silver and generated nearly $15 million of free cash flow. We control a huge land position here, not 88,000 hectares. It's 88 sq mi land package.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Continue the full translated transcript in StockNow.

Access every statement, the English original, and speaker-by-speaker history with StockNow Pro.

View the full transcript with Pro

Other earnings calls that day

View calls from this day