Santacruz Silver's Third Quarter—Bolivar Bouncing Back, Mill Capacity the Real Story

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-10-22 — Bing News — zinc price LME

Santacruz Silver produced 1,500,958 ounces of silver and 22,080 tonnes of zinc in the third quarter of 2026. Those are the headline figures. The company also pulled 3,316 tonnes of lead and 355 tonnes of copper out of its operations across Bolivia and Mexico.

But here's the thing worth paying attention to: consolidated output actually dropped 5 percent quarter-over-quarter. Both silver and zinc declined. This looks like a miss at first glance.

It's not. The drop tells you something important about how Santacruz is running the business now.

The Bolivar mine recovered dramatically. Silver production there jumped 19 percent from the previous quarter, climbing to 408,087 ounces. Year-over-year, the improvement is almost impossible to ignore—silver output more than tripled from 132,146 ounces in Q3 2025. The recovery makes sense: a localized flooding event in May 2025 had pushed the mine into a corner. Now, dewatering work has moved into higher-grade areas where the Pomabamba and Nane veins run, and the grind grades have doubled from 89 grams per tonne to 186 grams per tonne in the year.

Mining operations across all properties increased 2 percent in silver and 3 percent in zinc. But the consolidated figures fell because of deliberate choices upstream.

The San Lucas ore sourcing and processing business took a hit. That's the part of the operation that buys ore from third-party suppliers and processes it. The ore from San Lucas this quarter had lower head grades. Instead of just running it through the mill anyway, management reallocated milling capacity from San Lucas toward the higher-margin ore coming out of the company's own mines. That's economics working as it should—push the profitable stuff first, manage the rest around it.

This created a constraint. San Lucas is supposed to be a value-add business. It can't grow if there's no mill time for it.

So Santacruz bought a new mill. A 500-tonne-per-day milling facility. The acquisition closes at the beginning of Q4 2026, and operations start immediately after. That mill will process San Lucas ore exclusively, freeing up the three existing processing plants in Bolivia to handle ore from the mining operations full-time.

Arturo Préstamo, the executive chairman, framed this as a growth play. The new facility, he said, would let the San Lucas ore processing business expand without competing internally for capacity. It would also let the company accelerate growth across the Bolivian mining operations. That's not wrong.

Actually, that's precisely right.

What makes this more or less impressive is the timing and the size of the bet. Santacruz isn't waiting for Q4 to sort itself out or asking for more capital. It's solving the problem now, mid-quarter, and betting that higher-grade zones at Caballo Blanco, the continued Bolivar recovery, and the recovery of those two high-grade veins will fill the extra mill time almost immediately. The company expects consolidated production to increase in Q4 on the back of these improvements.

Lead production jumped 5 percent to 3,316 tonnes, driven by stronger grades and recoveries at Zimapan, where silver recovery ticked up from 72 percent to 76 percent in the quarter. Copper production rose 7 percent to 355 tonnes. These are secondary metals to silver and zinc, but improvements across the portfolio matter when you're running a multi-metal operation across multiple geographies.

Year-over-year, consolidated silver was up 21 percent and zinc up 2 percent. Mining operations alone posted 30 percent silver growth and 10 percent zinc growth. The comparisons to Q3 2025 are tilted by the flooding, but the trends underneath—steady recovery, capacity solutions, higher grades in the worked areas—those are moving in the right direction.

Source: "Santacruz Silver Mining Ltd. reported total production of 1,500,958 ounces of silver, 22,080 tonnes of zinc, 3,316 tonnes of lead, and 355 tonnes of copper in the third quarter of 2026." — StreetInsider

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