Hecla Mining Co. (HL, Financial) has informed the market about the issuance of an unsecured corporate loan, which is made of 4.68% interest rate bearing senior notes. The corporate loan, which is worth approximately $31.6 million, has been purchased by a subsidiary of Investissment Québec, Ressources Québec, a financing arm of the Canadian government.
The debt securities will mature in May 2021. The funds collected will bring Hecla Mining’s total liquidity to approximately $251.6 million and will mainly be used to finance exploration activities at Casa Berardi in Quebec.
At Casa Berardi, Hecla Mining aims to prolong the life of the mine of many years since its exploration team stands by the expectation of discovering significant lodes of precious metal.
The proceeds will also be used to further strengthen operations at Casa Berardi, said Phillips S. Baker, Jr., Hecla Mining's president and chief executive officer.
Strong operations at Casa Berardi have permitted, added Phillips S. Baker, the miner to double the throughput, to increase both gold reserves and output, to cut the all injury frequency rate of 70% and to enhance the working force to a current 950 employees since the asset was purchased.
As of March 5, Hecla Mining Co. (HL, Financial) is at $3.70 per share, up 0.07% on the New York Stock Exchange from the previous trading day with a volume of 3,337,100 shares traded. Over the last 10 days and three months of trading volumes of 3.7 million and 4.74 million were exchanged.
Source: Yahoo Finance
The stock has underperformed the Van Eck Vectors Gold Miners ETF (GDX, Financial) by more than 26% and is trading below the 50, 100 and 200-SMA lines. The market capitalization is $1.48 billion and the 52-weeks range is $3.38 to $6.17 per share.
The price-book (P/B) ratio is 0.99 times versus an industry median of 2.05 times and the EV-to-Ebitda (ttm) ratio is 11.35 versus an industry median of 10.18 times.
(Disclosure: I have no positions in any security mentioned in this article.)
