[quote=gandalf]Does anybody know, what’s the approximate production cost of mining an ounce of gold?[/quote]
I haven’t looked at gold mining companies in many years (and didn’t understand them well in the first place) so I’m going to get part of this wrong, but… there is not a straightforward answer principally because most gold miners actually mine more copper than gold in volume terms, and the gold is generally a byproduct (but the more valuable of the two, obviously) of copper mining. So, the miners tend to have a line item of how much it costs to mine each ounce of gold (in gross terms) and it’s netted out for monies they receive for the copper (and sometimes silver and other metals). But I believe that after netting out this other revenue and taking into account all of the costs, the range is about $300-$450/oz. if memory serves. And, obviously, it depends on how rich in gold (versus copper and other metals) the area is that’s being mined. So, it can be a very wide range. I believe that the cost of production (with all of the offsets) information is in every publicly-traded miner’s 10K, so it’s not a secret. I’m too lazy to look it up though. Understanding metals mining accounting is going down a bit of a rabbit hole – not nearly as bad as financials, but more complicated than the average company for sure.
