Okay - lets have a look at everything now that we are in Feb 2022 with the rear vision of Zinc prices and the last 2 years of Covid supply disruptions and with the closure of a lot of historic long term producers e.g. Gammsberg. Also bearing in mind the latest energy crisis in Europe has taken a lot of Zinc smelting capacity off-line. Obviously China managed to somehow get enough concentrates from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Myanmar to replace lost productions from Peru and other latin American producers.
Anyway - for ease of presentation I just decided to have a look at the producers, followed by developers (must be in construction) and then all the rest who are all still stranded with permitting/finance/government approvals/still doing exploration etc
AMI ($538M market cap)
AMI - is actually producing Zn concentrate but its also a Cu Pb and Au miner so its not a pure play, had some good Cu exploration results but still getting dragged down by its Dargues gold project acqusition and nothing outstanding for AMI investors this year.
CZL ($8.4M market cap)
CZL - has always had issues operating a very small boutique Pb Zn high grade mine in Mexico, and finally got out from under their smelters and other government and legal issues and finally got into production then promptly got robbed of their concentrate, yes you heard that right, armed bandits came in and took over 90 tonnes of Zn concentrates, apparently this is too difficult a crime to solve for the Federales which says everything about the challenges of operating in Mexico at the moment. So a sovereign risk story for CZL shareholders.
NCZ ($272.4M market cap) NOTE THE 6 MONTH CHART
NCZ - had had performance issues with tailings re treatment at Century and the picture has become muddied with the enormous consolidation/dilution even in late 2020 with Sibanye coming onto the register and the company deciding to purchase Mt Lyell in Tasmania, not really a fun time for NCZ investors hoping to reap the benefits of higher Zn prices. The only people to make money out of NCZ has been staff and Chinese smelters, a lot of effort expended for no profit.
RVR ($101.1 market cap)
RVR - have continued mining away at Thalanga but its also producing Cu and Pb concentrates and gold, and the acquisition of the Hillgrove Sb Au project means that its not a pure Zn story by any means, just a downward volatile trend for RVR investors probably based on Hillgrove execution risk and short LOM at Thalanga.
And now lets have a look at the overseas explorers/developers - MYL a very sad story of sovereign risk with the coup in Myanmar followed by suspension, and IBG seemingly going places until finance time (and you would expect a s^&tload of dilution to come from them), so its a slow race between the "will never be built" vs the arctic will it ever be built? companies. AZI look to still be in the slow lane with a marginal underground deposit in Italy despite what looks like a 10:1 consolidation.
In Australia - VXR became DVP and got Bill Beaument signed on which spiked the share price through the roof regardless of the economics of Sulphur Springs. PEX continue to drill their way into an opportunistic takeover of their Cobar discoveries and they are doing an excellent job proving up resources that someone else will mine, really needs regional consolidation to unlock the value of their discoveries.
About the only bright spots have been the ALB and RTR discoveries over at the Lennard Shelf area in WA. Two good exploration stories there and probably a matter of most management in WA being locked up within the state for a few years means that exploration has skewed towards WA rather than overseas or interstate. The downsides of this have been the full assay labs and long wait for results plus the other inflationary problems all baked into the WA economy from rig availability to staff availability which all results in companies competing for limited resources.
All in all - a very middling time for the Zinc industry and for Zinc investors, and I have found that Copper and Lithium have been much more rewarding hunting grounds for fundamental/long term investors, and they have been especially rewarded with discoveries, rather than owning the producers.
(20min delay)