Silver is finally getting a bit of the price action that its...

Silver is finally getting a bit of the price action that its much popular counterpart, gold, has been witnessing for some time now.
While investors have been glued to gold since the start of 2020, silver stocks have started to become more popular with thousands of ordinary Australian investors getting in on the price action.
The price of gold’s poorer cousin jumped to $US23.68 an ounce ($32.83/oz) on Friday, and it has rallied strongly from its mid-March low of $12.27/oz, according to metals website BullionVault.
Manuka Resources (ASX:MKR) has seen many small investors join its share register since listing on the ASX on July 14.
“The number of individual investors we have on our books has grown by 800 which has been astonishing,” executive chairman Dennis Karp told *.
“I put this down to the fact we are in production [for gold] and we will be the largest producer of primary silver in Australia,” he said.
“A lot of people are looking for exposure to silver,” Karp said.
A July 10 ASX filing showed Manuka had 651 shareholders, — none held under 5,000 shares — and 95 per cent of its shares were in the hands of 148 shareholders.

Wonawinta silver project

Manuka owns the Wonawinta silver project, which hosts a 52 million-ounce JORC-compliant resource grading 42 grams per tonne silver.
The mine is expected to be in production within the next nine to 12 months, Karp said.
Manuka also owns the Mt Boppy gold mine in the Cobar Basin in NSW’s Lachlan Fold Belt that started production in April and is targeting 32,000oz/year of gold production.
Primary silver gets converted into silver bars and ingots, whereas silver in-concentrate tends to contain other metal such as zinc or lead and has to be refined.
Another factor behind the surge in investor interest in silver stocks is the small number of companies that are close to producing.
“I think there is a limiting factor in the number of silver opportunities in Australia,” Karp said.
Manuka recently improved the capacity of its Wonawinta gold-silver production facility to 1 million tonnes per year from 850,000t/year following a refurbishment, Karp said.
Ore from the company’s Mount Boppy gold mine is trucked to the facility at a rate of 300,000 to 400,000t/year.
Currently all of Manukua’s gold is sent to a refinery in Sydney for further processing, and its silver will go there too, Karp said.

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