Endomines - Road to production long and bumpy

Working on production start-up
Endomines reported its Q2 results. With Friday still under care and maintenance during Q2, Endomines as expected did not produce any new gold concentrate and no revenue. Costs were higher than anticipated as the ramp-up of operations progressed and with significant D&A, relating largely to the Friday mine, Q2 EBIT of SEK -76.9m was clearly below our expectation of SEK -20.0m. Endomines continued its efforts to bring the Friday-mine back into production, having invested one million USD on upgrading the Orogrande Processing facility and enhancing the production capacity of the mine. Endomines has also begun n exploration surface drilling program for the Montana gold assets, a fundamental part of Endomines’ long-term value creation potential.

Seeing Friday + Pampalo production of ~20k oz in 2023
Endomines updated its mid-term goals for the Friday and Pampalo assets, expecting annual gold production of 7,800-9,000 oz and 10,000-11,500 oz respectively, at full production. Full production for Friday is expected by Q4 2021/Q1 2022 and Q2/Q3 2022 for Pampalo. The new Friday estimate is slightly softer than the previous 9,000 oz initial production target but future capacity expansion could still be viable. We have now also included estimates for Pampalo, expecting production to rise to some 20k oz in 2023 as both sites should have reached target capacity by then. With further near-term delays in the start-up of the mill at Friday (expected in late August) the 2021 production estimate was lowered to 1,500 oz (prev. 3,000-4,000 oz), which given pre-Q2 news was not completely surprising.

HOLD (BUY) with a target price of SEK 2.8 (2.9)
We have made some adjustments to our SOTP-model, based on which we adjust our target price to SEK 2.8 (2.9). With the recent share price increases we lower our rating to HOLD (BUY).