BREAKING NEWS: Peru Silver Mine Supply Collapsed In April
With the data now finally out, Peru’s silver mine production collapsed in April. Due to the shutdown of a large portion of Peru’s mining industry, as a result of the global contagion, the impact on the world’s second-largest silver supply was enormous. While I had mentioned in previous articles that I expected to see silver production from Mexico and Peru to decline significantly, I’m amazed actually to see the real numbers.
Over the past several months, I have checked the Peru Ministry of Mines website for updates on the domestic mine supply figures. However, they have not updated their monthly production data since December 2019. I tried writing the Peru Ministry of Mines website to find out why they haven’t been updating their figures, but I received no reply.
I decided to do a bit more digging and found a newly released April 2020 Mining Update in response to the global contagion. This new Mining Bulletin published Peru’s mine production data for January to April 2020. According to the recently released data, Peru’s silver mine supply in April fell to 85 metric tons (mt) versus 322 mt during the same month in 2019:
Peru’s silver mine supply collapsed by 74% in just a few months. If we convert to troy ounces, the year-over-year change was a decline from 10.3 million oz (Moz) to 2.7 Moz. Thus, the world’s second-largest silver mine supply fell 7.6 Moz in April. Now, if we look at Peru’s monthly mine supply over the past year, we can see that silver production started to decline in March:
As the Peruvian government started implementing mine closures in the middle of March, silver production fell by nearly 100 metric tons compared to February.
So, if we compare the change in the first four months of 2020 versus the same period last year, here is the result:
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