McEwen Mining at 2025 Precious Metals Summit: Promising Copper and Gold Future

On Wednesday, 10 September 2025, McEwen Mining Inc. (NYSE:MUX) showcased a strategic vision at the 2025 Precious Metals Summit - Beaver Creek. Rob McEwen, the company’s leader, highlighted a bright outlook, driven by rising commodity prices and undervalued gold investments. While emphasizing growth prospects in copper and gold, McEwen also acknowledged the challenges of higher production costs. The company’s performance on the New York and Toronto exchanges underscores its market presence.

Key Takeaways

• McEwen Mining emphasizes copper and gold assets amid favorable macroeconomic conditions.
• The Los Azules copper project is projected to generate substantial revenue with a long mine life.
• Gold production is expected to increase significantly by 2030.
• McEwen Mining trades at a discount compared to peers, indicating potential value.
• Environmental permits and investment incentives in Argentina support future growth.

Financial Results

• Gold, silver, and copper prices are on the rise, with commodities at a 55-year low, suggesting potential upside.
• Historical analysis suggests gold could significantly outperform the Dow, with juniors in the gold market potentially seeing substantial gains.
• McEwen Mining trades about one million shares daily, with Rob McEwen holding 15% of the company.
• The company is trading at a 50% discount compared to peers, with potential for a significant increase in valuation.
• EBITDA increased by 91% over the past year, reflecting strong financial performance.

Operational Updates

• McEwen Mining operates gold mines in Ontario and Nevada, with plans to restart a mine in Mexico.
• The company acquired Timberline for Nevada exploration, discovering high-grade gold and silver.
• Los Azules copper project is advancing with a heap leach operation planned for cost efficiency and an environmental permit secured.

Future Outlook

• The Los Azules IPO is anticipated to provide significant upside, with the project offering a competitive edge in the copper market.
• Exploration potential at Los Azules includes expansion opportunities and identified targets.
• Argentina’s RIGI incentive scheme enhances the investment environment by lowering taxes and allowing international arbitration.

Conclusion

For more detailed insights, refer to the full transcript of the conference call.

Full transcript - 2025 Precious Metals Summit - Beaver Creek:

Rob McEwen, McEwen Inc.: And gold’s going up, silver’s going up, copper’s going up. And we’re in Beaver Creek. Put a smile on your face. Alright. So, you know, the macro picture is really looking good right now.

We have commodities at a fifty five year low. They’re cyclical. The best bet in Goldman Sachs commodity issue right now is gold. It has the highest consistency. And gold investments around the world are at the lowest point they have been in many years.

So we’re entering a bull market with a lot of upside, at least from my perspective. Copper is $4.45. Gold, over this long period of a hundred and twenty one years, had some bottoms. And I think we’re gonna see another bottom and you really have to speculate, Does it ever go back down to one or two ounces buys the Dow? And if that were the case, could we see 17 to $20,000?

Few years back, I said it was gonna be 5,000. At that time, the Canadian dollar was at par with The US. Right now the Canadian dollar is about $5,100. So we got the 5,000 there but just we have bad government there that sank our dollar. Since ’six, we’re looking at gold outperforming the Dow by a considerable margin and here is where I think this conference really comes into play is looking at relative performance.

Gold’s way up there, the seniors are starting to catch up, the juniors are still in negative territory and if anybody is a student of history looking at gold markets, when we are at the zenith of the bull market, the juniors have added three or four zeros to their performance number and the seniors have added two. So you want to be looking at this space. McEwen Mining listed New York, Toronto. We trade about a million shares a day at least, that’s a three month moving average. I own 15% of the company.

Los Azules is the ninth largest copper deposit in the world, So we got a big option there. Our exploration is increasing our resources and future production and if you took all of our resources and I know some security commissions don’t like it, but if you took the measured indicated, proven and probable and inferred behind every share of McEwen Mining is just under half an ounce of gold equivalent. That’s converting the silver and the copper as well. So we have good leverage, gold, silver and copper. Ownership, my personal investments over 200,000,000 in the company for 15%.

I haven’t really pushed for a higher salary because I wanted to see the money put in the ground. Management’s estimates of what the company might be worth, there are three parts to it. There’s the copper project which you’ll hear about. We have five portfolio royalties. The biggest is on Los Azules, it’s one and a quarter percent based on our PEA.

That would yield over the life of the mine better than $400,000,000. And then just looking at gold and silver, there’s some peer companies down below. We look at the enterprise value divided by annual production. They’re trading at $9,000, we’re trading at 6. If we trade it on that’s a 50% discount, the value we have there.

If you put a 50% premium where we’ve had numbers before, You’re looking at we’re trading just over US13 dollars and so you get about a 45% raise to get to the low and a 4.5x to get to the high. Terms of cash, just over $50,000,000 working capital. I can say measuring our profitability by EBITDA. In the past year, we’ve gone up 91% and that’s the value of having a high cost operation that the gross margins move a lot faster. We’re looking at going from about 130,000, 135,000 ounces this year to 225,000, maybe a little bit higher by 2030 and that’s organic growth.

Cash flow is starting off quite smartly, again picking up and you can see the annual production on the right hand and the cash flow on the left and the blue line is our free cash flow. And then sensitivity no, there should be one in there. There’s a sensitivity using two different gold prices. It looks like a good year. Our operations are spread through The Americas.

An underground gold mine in Northern Ontario, Timmins, a known gold can. An open pit gold mine in Nevada in Cortez Trend, another very prospective area. A mine we were operating, a small open pit gold silver mine in Mexico. It was care and maintenance. We’re going to bring it back on stream next year.

A 49% interest in an underground gold silver mine run by Hoshfield in Southern Argentina, a grassroots copper project right next door to Marigold and down in Argentina, Los Azules, which is a very large copper project. This is our share price in the last thirty six months. As you can see, we’ve outperformed the GDX, GDXJ by a factor of two, silver by a factor of three, NASDAQ and Dow by 4X, 8X and copper by 11X. We brought in we separated the copper from our gold assets in ’21. I put 40,000,000 in.

We raised a total of 80. Since then, we’ve raised $450,000,000 for the copper project. We’ll have a feasibility study out by the October. You’re looking at a mine that has conceivably fifty five year life and 65% gross profit. And in the first four years, doing over 200,000 tons of copper a year.

Put it in, if you use today’s values, that would be about a $2,000,000,000 revenue with a 60% margin. This is our production guidance. Our cost this year in our gold operations will be a little bit higher between and 15% higher depending on the operations when we’ve been putting money into development and our production came down as a result of that. But that’ll change next year. If you looked at here are our resources.

There’s 4,200,000 ounces of gold in all those categories. There is 17 37,400,000 ounces of silver and 17 and a half billion pounds of copper for a 46% interest. So a large resource. Let’s get into Argentina. It’s along the spine of the Andes.

It’s Peru is 10% of the world’s annual gold production. Chile is 30%. One day, I think with all the projects that are in Argentina, particularly in San Juan province, it will challenge Peru’s copper production. This is just a view. I don’t wanna show this right now because it’s five minutes long and I don’t have five minutes.

So this is you can visit this on our website. There’s a QR code. But we’re building a mine that’s very ecologically sensitive and is a new model, I think, for mining of the future. And to convince the public that we’re good guys and we’re doing a good job and we need all of these metals to live in the world we live in today. And we have to increase that appreciation.

So it’s a great little video. It’s five minutes if you could take the time. This is we’re the ninth largest undeveloped copper deposit in the world and we’ve done, I mentioned 450,000,000. We’ve done four financings so far, the last one at $30 and that put an implied value behind every share of McEwen Mining of $8.44 and a value of 984,000,000. I think it’s going higher.

Our shareholders, we attracted global players. We have Stellantis, the sixth largest car manufacturer in the world as our second largest shareholder. Subsidiary of Rio Tinto, the second largest mining company is in there, third largest. I led the first financing. I’m in there for just under thirteen.

McEwen Mining is in there for forty six. So between McEwen Mine, well, it’s not McEwen Mining anymore. We changed the name to McEwen Inc. To give us greater latitude. But together, we own 60%.

There’s a lot in the news about Lundin and Philo and Jose Maria and BHP, a deal that was done, 4 and a half billion dollar value on it. And I just like to contrast their project to our project. Over on the left hand side, you see a little icon, that’s the province of San Juan. They’re at the top of the province. We’re midway up.

All of us are on the border with Chile. We’re at a lower altitude. We’re at 3,100 to 3,600 meters. Top end of Philo is Base Camp Everest. That when you get up that high, have trouble breathing, your machines have trouble operating.

Resources, we’re half the resource of the combined and our implied value is one quarter. So when we do our IPO, I think there’s some upside on that. We’re closer to infrastructure, roads and major highways and it’s we’re going to be we’re going to be a heap leach operation so our capital costs are a lot less. Capital intensity is a lot less and we’re likely to be start in operation before they are. So as I said, I think there’s some lift in there.

We’re at about a quarter of their value and half their resource. This is the PEA that was done in June ’23. We’ll have the feasibility out. The life will be a little shorter at first on the main process. We’re looking at using some technology from Rio and we can see fifty years of production.

As I said, a good margin there. I’m gonna run through this. This is the pit shell. The resource is in the dark color and then which we mine and then in the PEA and then the larger resource as a result of the drilling we’ve done. There’s room to grow to the north, to the south, and deeper as you can see at the ends of that project.

So that we think that’s a larger resource and we have 32,000 hectares and we have seven exploration targets on there where we have intrusive copper oxides and we’re going to be drilling on that. So we think this resource could grow beyond here. We have an environmental permit to construct. The RIGI which is an incentive scheme by the government of Argentina to attract foreign capital is significant, lowers the tax rate, takes off foreign exchange controls, allows you to get dividends out of the country, it allows you to arbitrate outside the country if you have difficulties with the government, which is a big thing. Lots of companies coming in after that legislation was introduced.

Rio spent 2 and a half billion on a lithium project. You had BHP in Lundin doing a 4 and a half billion. Glencore is talking about twelve or thirteen billion there. Argentina is the place to go right now. So looking at our gold in the next minute and a half, We’re in Nevada.

We’re finding gold at $15 an ounce last year. We have targets on Gold Bar. We bought a company in August called Timberline. We’re exploring that property. We’re looking for they had a reported resource but not compliant with today’s values.

So we’re looking for consistency. We’re finding that right now. We encountered a new fault zone parallel to the main zone that was quite interesting. It ran the equivalent of 1.8 ounces per ton. It was 50 grams gold, 780 grams silver, 15% lead, and two and a half percent zinc.

Narrow intercept, 4.3 feet but nevertheless, it’s a new zone and very interesting. And then they had another property which we now have which was one of the highest grade gold projects in Nevada in early nineteen hundreds called 7 Troughs. It was mining better than 1.2 ounces per ton. It was shut down because of water issues. There’s a large clay cap on it.

We’re starting to explore on that right now. In Timmins, both these properties have large exploration programs and we think we can increase production here and that’s the ramp going underground. There’s 2,000,000 ounces at Grey Fox right now. We think we can expand that but you can see some of the grades there. Had some really sweet things.

But now I’m out of time. Yes, Rob. So any questions?

Unidentified speaker: Well, actually, we don’t have time for questions, Rob. I apologize.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.