Aya Gold & Silver Passes Its 180,000-Metre Boumadine Drilling Target

Drill crews at Boumadine have completed the year's infill target two months early. Aya Gold & Silver Inc. said on November 4, 2026 that drilling at the Moroccan project had passed the 180,000 metres planned for the whole of 2026.

The total stood at 181,685 metres on November 4.

The same release added five high-grade intercepts along the Main Trend and three new exploration permits that close gaps around the Boumadine mining licence. Add a record production quarter at the Zgounder silver mine and an updated economic study filed in October, and the company has a producing mine funding a second, larger project whose drilling is ahead of its own schedule. My view is that Aya's position is one most silver juniors would trade for.

Aya's shares closed at C$35.81 on the Toronto Stock Exchange on November 4, 2026, up 10.94 per cent, per end-of-day data from TMX Money read at 16:20 ET.

Five holes carry the grade along a 5.4-kilometre trend

Infill drilling is the close-spaced work that turns a known zone into one engineers can design a mine around, and Boumadine's programme is large. The company plans 360,000 metres across 2026 and 2027. It reported on November 4, 2026 that 51 per cent of that is now done.

The intercepts in the new batch sit along the Main Trend, the 5.4-kilometre mineralised corridor that the company's September 9 release described as open in all directions. The release gives them as silver-equivalent grades, a single number that converts the gold, zinc and lead in a sample into ounces of silver at fixed prices (here US$30 an ounce for silver and US$2,800 for gold).

Source: Aya Gold & Silver release, November 4, 2026. The company states that true widths are undetermined and all values are uncut.

Two features stand out. Gold does much of the work in the higher-grade holes: at 5.53 grams per tonne, gold accounts for most of the silver-equivalent grade in the first hole in the table. And several of the intervals start within 160 metres of surface, which matters for a project the September study plans as a combined open pit and underground mine.

David Lalonde, Aya's executive vice-president of exploration and its qualified person under Canadian disclosure rules, approved the technical content.

Three permits fill in the map around the licence

The permit news is shorter and easier to miss. Aya said the three new exploration permits fill gaps around the Boumadine mining licence and bring the project area to 357 square kilometres.

A contiguous land package is worth having around a trend that is still open. It means follow-up drilling along strike does not stop at someone else's boundary. The company also said follow-up drilling on the eight-kilometre Asirem trend, a gold zone west of the Main Trend, is planned for later this year.

Zgounder sets records behind the drilling

Aya drills Boumadine with a producing mine behind it.

The Zgounder silver mine produced 1,497,749 ounces of silver in the third quarter of 2026, the company reported on October 14, 2026. The mill ran at an average 4,096 tonnes a day in the quarter to September 30 and recovered 92.0 per cent of the silver it received.

Reprocessing an old pyrite stockpile at Boumadine added 536,879 silver-equivalent ounces in the same quarter. The total of 2,034,628 ounces was a company record, 51 per cent above the third quarter of 2025.

Maple's October 14 piece worked out that the Boumadine stockpile supplied about 26 per cent of the quarter's ounces (536,879 of 2,034,628).

President and chief executive Benoit La Salle said in that release that Aya is "firmly on track" to meet its 2026 production guidance.

The balance sheet behind it was last reported for the quarter ended June 30, 2026. The company's second-quarter MD&A shows cash and cash equivalents of US$182.8 million at June 30, 2026, up from US$136.3 million at December 31, 2025. Long-term debt, including the portion due within a year, was US$83.7 million at June 30, 2026.

Revenue for the three months to June 30, 2026 was US$96.8 million, and net income for the same quarter was US$35.0 million. The MD&A states that the company's cash and operating cash flow will be sufficient to meet its obligations for at least the next 12 months.

Subtracting the debt from the cash leaves about US$99 million of net cash at June 30, 2026. Those balances predate three months of drilling at the current pace, and the September 30 figures arrive on November 12.

The study the drilling is meant to firm up

Boumadine already has numbers attached to it. The updated preliminary economic assessment announced on September 9, 2026, and filed as a technical report on SEDAR+ and EDGAR on October 20, 2026 (the company announced the filing on October 21), describes a 14-year mine with an after-tax net present value of US$3.5 billion at a 5 per cent discount rate and initial capital of US$463 million. Net present value is today's worth of the mine's projected future cash flows.

The base case assumes US$3,500 gold and US$50 silver, and the study plans about 348,000 gold-equivalent ounces a year in the first five years.

A preliminary economic assessment is an early-stage study. The company's own words are that it is "preliminary in nature," that it includes inferred resources, and that "there is no certainty that the 2026 PEA will be realized." Inferred resources are the least certain category of estimate, too uncertain to support a reserve on their own.

Aya's own sales show the price backdrop. Its Q2-2026 MD&A, filed August 13, 2026, reports an average net realised silver price of US$68.29 per ounce for the three months to June 30, 2026, against US$33.86 a year earlier, which is the price Zgounder's silver sold at in one quarter and not an input of the Boumadine study.

That is where the drilling comes in. Infill holes are meant to raise the confidence of the estimate so that a feasibility study, the bank-grade engineering document a construction decision rests on, can use more of it. Aya expects that feasibility study in 2027. Maple's October 21 piece set out the study's price cases and payabilities in detail; nothing in the November release changes them.

A copper-silver step near Zgounder

On September 1 Aya agreed to acquire a 139-square-kilometre portfolio of exploration permits, including a mining licence, about 35 kilometres west of Zgounder. The price is C$4.0 million, paid in Aya shares.

The transaction is proposed, and its closing depends on confirmatory due diligence and on Moroccan, Canadian and Toronto Stock Exchange approvals; the company has not named a closing date. Mr. La Salle described it as "consistent with our vision of building a dominant land position around Zgounder," and the company plans to start exploring the ground over the next 12 to 18 months.

A producer drilling out its own successor

Aya has a mine that produced a record quarter in September and earned US$35.0 million in the three months to June 30, 2026, and it is spending part of that cash on a second project whose drilling ran ahead of plan this year.

The risks are specific. The silver-equivalent grades depend on the metal prices the company assumes, and the study's break-even, according to the September 9 release, is US$1,704 gold and US$24.34 silver. On November 4, 2026, December gold futures on COMEX last traded at US$4,069.40 an ounce and December silver at US$52.28, per CME Group's delayed quotes read at 17:06 ET. All of Aya's operations are in Morocco, so permits, royalties and the state of the country's mining code bear on every project. And a feasibility study can change a preliminary design, sometimes substantially.

Aya is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and on Nasdaq under AYA, and its shares also trade in Frankfurt under the symbol 0HE1 (WKN A2QAQY, ISIN CA05466C1095), according to Deutsche Börse's instrument page, read on November 4, 2026.

Results for the third quarter arrive before the market opens on Thursday, November 12, 2026, with a conference call at 10 a.m. Eastern. They will carry the first balance sheet since June 30, 2026, and the first financial statements to include Zgounder's record quarter.