News

March 18, 2009

Gold Is Adding Significant Spice To Silver Standard’s Traditional Asset Base

By Charles Wyatt

Canadian-listed Silver Standard Resources has made some astonishing progress over the past 18 months. Maybe the fact that it was one of the first to get caught up in the asset backed commercial paper scam – or toxic debt as it is known over here – came as a wake-up call. That was back in the summer of 2007, when Silver Standard had to write-down many millions of dollars on its investments. Up until then there was a feeling that the company was cushioned by its huge resources of silver which made it a liquid and highly leveraged unexpiring call on silver. The write-down hit the rating, however, and the best way to get it back up again was to get into production at speed. So in February of 2008 Silver Standard raised C$134 million in convertible notes and it was off to the races with the construction of a mine at Pirquitas, its 100 per cent owned project in northwestern Argentina.

Process commissioning is now underway and ore delivery will commence to the silver circuit at any moment. Initial production will focus on the processing of over 400,000 tonnes of run-of-mine grade jig tails from historic operations, and will then move to material from the open pit. More than five million tonnes of material has been moved from the Pirquitas open pit and stockpiling of ore has commenced. The only worry has been that inflation in wages and local inputs has put pressure on the...