First Quantum Minerals announced on Thursday that it had achieved its highest yield for annual copper production in 2019.
The miner, while announcing its annual production for 2019 and its expenditure plans through 2022, noted that it had produced 702,000mt of copper in 2019—a 96,000mt increase over the prior year period.
FQM announced that its Q4 copper production in 2019 was up 46,000mt to 204,000mt from 158,000mt in Q4 2018.
Furthermore, the mid-December start-up of its Cobre Panama mill, the eighth one in FQM’s portfolio, added capacity to bring the copper producer’s annualized total mill throughput to 85mn mt of which 6.6mn mt was achieved in December of 2019. Copper production at the mills was reported at 60,000mt, for Q4 2019, of which 25,000mt was produced in December.
The company has forecasted an average production of around 830,000mt across all its mill sites over the next three years and expects C1 copper to be priced between $1.20-1.40/lb.