Canadian Miners Made More Metal Than They Sold Last Quarter

On October 8, 2026, two Toronto-listed mining companies published preliminary production figures for the September quarter. Both reported more metal coming out of the ground than going off their books.

DPM Metals Inc. said in a release carried on GlobeNewswire that morning that its three mines produced about 97,000 gold-equivalent ounces in the quarter and sold about 77,000. Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. said in a release on its own website that the Kamoa-Kakula complex produced 76,401 tonnes of copper in saleable products, up from 64,328 tonnes in the June quarter, and that the amount of unsold copper it was holding had risen over the quarter from roughly 40,000 tonnes to roughly 43,000.

Mining and metals names took 26 of the 47 places on this week's Canadian mover lists, more than every other sector combined. Both of these releases sat inside that run, and both carried the same feature.

Neither company sold less metal because buyers wanted less of it. The gap between what a mine produces and what its owner sells opens for three quite separate reasons, and the three behave differently. One of them closes by itself in a few weeks. One of them never closes, because it is not a delay at all. And one of them closes only when a piece of plant starts working properly.

A mine does not produce metal, it produces something a smelter buys

Start with the thing the word "produced" is doing in these releases.

Most base-metal and many gold mines do not ship metal. They ship concentrate: a powder, usually between 20 and 60 per cent metal by weight, with rock and other metals making up the rest. Concentrate is sold to a smelter, which pays for the metal it can recover and charges for the recovering.

That charge has two parts, and both shrink the quantity that gets paid for. The first is payability, the share of the contained metal the smelter agrees to pay for at all. The remainder covers the metal the smelter will lose in its own furnaces and the margin it keeps. The second is treatment and refining charges, a per-tonne and per-pound fee on top. A mine can therefore ship a tonne of concentrate containing 300 kilograms of zinc and be paid for appreciably less than 300 kilograms of zinc.

So when a producer reports ounces or tonnes "produced", it usually means metal contained in the product it made. When it reports metal "sold", it often means payable metal, the quantity the buyer actually paid for. Those are two different measurements of the same material, and subtracting one from the other produces a number that looks like a shortfall and is partly a definition.

DPM's release makes the distinction explicit. Its consolidated table reports metal produced in concentrate against payable metal sold.

The three gaps, and how to tell them apart

The first gap is timing. Concentrate accumulates at the mine, moves by truck or rail to a port, waits for a vessel and is weighed and assayed on arrival. A shipment that leaves in the last week of September can be a fourth-quarter sale. This gap reverses: a quarter that ships late is followed by a quarter that sells more than it makes.

The second gap is payability and charges, described above. This one does not reverse, because nothing is owed. It shows up as a stable percentage, quarter after quarter, and its size depends on which metals are in the concentrate. Zinc and lead concentrates carry heavier deductions than copper concentrate, and gold in a copper concentrate is treated differently again.

The third gap is conversion. If a company owns the smelter, or has committed its concentrate to one, the metal can be stuck between the two plants. It has been produced. It is not in anyone's warehouse. It is in a stockpile, a circuit or a queue, waiting for furnace capacity that does not yet exist at the rate the mine is feeding it.

The useful test is the pattern. A timing gap swings from quarter to quarter. A payability gap holds roughly steady. A conversion gap grows.

DPM's quarter has two of the three in it

DPM Metals runs Chelopech and Ada Tepe in Bulgaria and Vareš in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The release reports gold-equivalent ounces in thousands, so the figures below are rounded as published.

Source: DPM Metals preliminary third-quarter production release, October 8, 2026.

Three things fall out of that table. Ada Tepe sold more than it produced over nine months, 26,000 ounces against 25,000, which is what a timing gap looks like when it reverses. Chelopech ran a modest and consistent gap, 5,000 ounces in the quarter and 14,000 over nine months, around 9 per cent of production. Vareš produced 109,000 ounces over nine months and sold 69,000, a gap of 40,000 ounces, or 36.7 per cent of what it made.

The metal detail says why. Vareš is DPM's zinc and lead mine. Across the group in the September quarter, DPM reported 28 million pounds of zinc produced in concentrate against 16 million pounds payable sold, and over nine months 52 million pounds against 30 million. That is a 42.9 per cent gap in the quarter and a 42.3 per cent gap over nine months: the same proportion twice, which is the signature of payability rather than shipping.

Multiply the headline gap by a price once, and attach the limits. DPM's release gives an average market gold price for the quarter of US$4,270 an ounce. Twenty thousand gold-equivalent ounces at that price is about US$85.4 million of metal; the nine-month gap of 53,000 ounces at the nine-month average of US$4,554 is about US$241 million. Those are metal-price values, not money the company was owed and did not get. Concentrate never sells at the metal price, for the reasons above, and the release does not quantify the deductions. The figure establishes the order of magnitude and nothing finer.

DPM's release does not explain the gap at all. It says the company expects to reach the high end of its consolidated gold-equivalent guidance for 2026, that Vareš is expected to exceed the high end of its own range and reach a full run rate of 850,000 tonnes a year by year end, and that the guidance figures themselves sit in the May 5, 2026 management discussion and analysis. The interpretation above is ours, drawn from the structure of the table.

Ivanhoe's 43,000 tonnes are a furnace problem

Kamoa-Kakula in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the third case, and the cleanest example of it in Canadian-listed mining.

The concentrators produced 68,188 tonnes of copper in concentrate in the quarter. The 76,401-tonne saleable figure is made of four streams: 61,506 tonnes of anode from the on-site smelter, 2,347 tonnes of blister toll-treated at the Lualaba Copper Smelter, 5,645 tonnes of slag concentrate and 6,904 tonnes of high-grade fines tendered for sale. The company says the smelter ran at about 60 per cent of its 500,000-tonne-a-year design capacity, with sulphuric acid output around 40,000 tonnes a month against a 700,000-tonne-a-year design. The release does not state the basis on which that utilisation figure is calculated, and anode output of 61,506 tonnes is below 60 per cent of a quarter's share of design capacity, so the two numbers are not directly comparable as published.

The inventory line is the one that carries the story. Ivanhoe says it held approximately 40,000 tonnes of unsold copper at the start of the quarter, mainly in concentrates on site and at Lualaba plus copper inside the smelter circuit, and approximately 43,000 tonnes at the end. The 6,904 tonnes of fines tendered for sale were added to inventory, and more fines are expected to be tendered in the December quarter. No sales or shipment volumes appear in the release, and it does not mention metal in transit.

At the London Metal Exchange's day-delayed three-month closing price of US$14,309.00 a tonne, shown on the exchange's copper page on October 9, 2026, 43,000 tonnes of copper carries a metal-price value of about US$615 million, and the quarter's build of roughly 3,000 tonnes about US$43 million. The same caution applies: concentrate and in-circuit material do not realise the metal price, and the release does not break the inventory into its forms.

This is the gap that grows. Production rose about 19 per cent on the June quarter and the unsold pile rose with it, which is what happens when the mill is faster than the furnace. Ivanhoe's guidance tells the same story from the other end. The company's release of December 3, 2025, carried on Newsfile, set 2026 production at 380,000 to 420,000 tonnes. The October 8 release puts it at 290,000 to 310,000 tonnes and says output is trending towards the lower end. The midpoint has fallen from 400,000 tonnes to 300,000, a quarter of the original figure, in a year when the concentrators did their job.

Panama is the version with no timing in it at all

First Quantum Minerals Ltd. reported second-quarter results on July 28, 2026. It produced 100,487 tonnes of copper on a contained basis and sold 93,300 tonnes, a gap of 7,187 tonnes or 7.2 per cent, with the sales figure excluding 12,207 tonnes of anode made from third-party concentrate at Kansanshi.

Inside that quarter, Cobre Panamá produced 3,216 tonnes of concentrate, its first since the mine was ordered shut, under a processing programme the Government of Panama authorised on April 7, 2026. The release states that there were no sales from Cobre Panamá in the second quarter of 2026. The company also reported about 38 million tonnes of stockpiled mineralised ore on site, containing roughly 70,000 tonnes of recoverable copper.

That is the limit case, and it is useful precisely because it is extreme. Metal can be produced, counted, audited and reported by a Canadian issuer while no mechanism exists to turn it into cash. The comparison with Kamoa-Kakula holds only on that point: Ivanhoe's constraint is a furnace it owns and is ramping, Panama's is a government and an arbitration, and the second is a far harder thing to forecast than the first.

The number that becomes revenue is the smaller one

Canada's mineral production was worth C$64.3 billion in 2024 on Natural Resources Canada's preliminary figures, down 9 per cent from C$70.4 billion in 2023, and the department counts more than 1,097 mining issuers across the Toronto and TSX Venture exchanges in the same year. Anyone holding a Canadian equity index fund owns a slice of that, and the quarterly rhythm is the same for all of it: a preliminary production release arrives first and gets the headline, and the financial statements that convert it into revenue arrive weeks later. Ivanhoe's third-quarter statements are due after the market closes on November 3, 2026.

Between those two documents, the production figure is the only number available, and it is the larger of the two. The gap is not hidden. DPM published both columns side by side and Ivanhoe published its inventory level twice in the same paragraph. It is simply reported in a form that rewards subtraction.

Three questions do the work. Does the gap reverse, hold or grow across the last four quarters. Which metals are in the concentrate, because zinc and lead deductions are large and permanent. And if the gap is growing, is the constraint a plant the company controls or a decision it does not.

Metal in a shed is not a sale, and the shed is in the release.

Transparency note. This is an independent due-diligence analysis and editorial opinion piece produced by The Maple Markets editorial desk. It is not sponsored, promoted or commissioned, and no compensation of any kind has been received from any issuer, government body or organisation named in this article or any party acting on their behalf. The analysis is based on public disclosure available as of the publish date; every figure is attributed to its primary source. The Maple Markets and its authors may hold positions in securities mentioned; nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security, and readers should not treat it as investment advice. Past disclosure does not guarantee future results. Policies: Editorial Standards · Financial Disclaimer.