Just read the news release. The company production plan has not been able to break even or make a profit so they are once again putting the operation on care & maintenance. I suspect this was the final reason that Clevenger is gone. This present market pricing for gold and silver has been a tough environment for many smaller Mexican operations so once again Golden Minerals has to act. This doesn’t change the longer term prospects for this company and its various mineral assets, it just says that in this cost environment with present mill status the company can’t make money. This is also the case for numerous other Mexican operations like Great Panther as an example but they had much more cash in the kitty than Golden to weather what has been a very long term storm to date.
I had expected and hoped they could make just enough to justify operations at these poor gold/silver prices but they seem to have fallen just short of this objective so are doing the right thing. Thankfully Sentient has our back or the markets would have skinned us alive. The outlook for Golden in 2016 has them making good money leasing the oxide plant to Hecla, better prospect in Argentina with political changes occurring making El Quevar much more valuable, expect new potential feed to supplement sulphide operations for a renewed start up later in 2016 and probably some exploration results which of course the market seems to not care about. Mexico continues to offer very good prospects going forward but gold/silver prices must increase to reasonable levels.
Not the outcome we want in the short term but still very viable going forward if gold/silver show any good signs of reasonable pricing.
