$454M for Three Canadian Mines

I’ve just released two new features on SECSift:

Both also work inside Claude and ChatGPT through the SECSift MCP.

Note: The 3-minute interactive demo (on a computer) walks through both features.

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Take a look at this copper market forecast from Bernstein, as published in the Financial Times:

Bernstein expects copper supply to fall short of demand from 2027, with the gap widening to more than 12Mt a year by 2040.

So what’s causing the shortfall? To start, mines are losing output.

In 2025, the International Energy Agency (IEA) counted 1.5Mt of copper mine disruptions, over 6% of global mined supply, including a mudflow at Indonesia’s Grasberg mine and flooding at the Kamoa-Kakula mine in the DRC.

New mines are also getting harder to find and slower to build.

The IEA points out that (1) the average grade of the world’s copper mines has fallen 40% since 1991, (2) only 5% of the copper deposits discovered in the past 35 years were found in the last decade, and (3) a new copper project takes ~17 years to go from discovery to production.

Under today’s policies, the IEA projects a 25% shortfall in mined copper by 2035, or ~7Mt (25% × ~27Mt needed from mines).

On the chart below, supply from existing and announced mines (the orange bars) falls short of what the world needs from mines (the lines) from 2030, and the shortfall widens as mine supply shrinks through 2040:

So how should you position for the shortage?

One way is to own miners restarting old mines, since a mine that’s already been built can skip most of the ~17-year wait.

Magna Mining (TSX: NICU, OTCQX: MGMNF), a copper miner in Sudbury, Ontario, that bought most of its mines cheaply from a copper giant, is one of the more promising companies I’ve identified.

After more than a century of mining, Sudbury has plenty of past-producing mines to restart. Per Magna’s September deck, Brazil’s Vale (VALE) and Switzerland’s Glencore (GLEN) are the only other companies with significant property holdings in the Sudbury Basin, and they run the district’s two mills and two smelters.

Magna has agreements to sell its ore to both, so its next restarts don’t need a new mill.

Besides copper, Magna’s ore carries nickel, and nickel prices now move with Indonesia, which mines almost two-thirds of the world’s supply. A growing share of Indonesia’s nickel comes from dissolving ore in sulfuric acid.

So when Indonesia cut its mining quota and acid prices doubled in 2026, London Metal Exchange (LME) nickel hit $20,000/tonne in May, before easing to ~$16,500/tonne by late September.

Magna’s stock trades at CAD$2.45/share (September 28 close), down 9% y/y and 38% below its CAD$3.94 intraday high on January 29, 2026:

At CAD$2.45 across 313.35M shares, Magna’s market cap is US$542M, and it holds ~US$124M of cash.

Counting its convertible notes, in-the-money options, and share units as shares, and netting out its cash plus the ~US$5.1M from exercising the options, enterprise value is ~US$454M.

So for US$454M, you get McCreedy West, the producing mine that carried Magna to its first quarter of positive free cash flow (FCF) in Q2 2026. You also get Levack and Crean Hill, two past-producing mines with a preliminary economic assessment (PEA) and a pre-feasibility study (PFS), respectively, due in the first half of October.

Notably, Magna’s leaders have run McCreedy West and Levack before. Both mines belonged to FNX Mining, a Canadian miner, before they passed to KGHM, the Polish copper giant that sold them to Magna. CEO Jason Jessup led the FNX team that restarted Levack, and chair Vern Baker was FNX’s VP of Operations.

Jessup says (1) Levack alone could produce 2-3x McCreedy West’s output, (2) R2, a high-grade zone Magna found at Levack, won’t be in the PEA, and (3) Magna doesn’t plan any more financings after Alpayana, a Peruvian mining group, invested US$99M in August.

In other words, if Jessup is right, Magna could triple or quadruple its output (McCreedy West plus 2-3x from Levack) without raising more money, and R2 would come on top of whatever the PEA shows.

So the question is whether CAD$2.45 is an early price for a multi-mine Sudbury producer, or a price that already assumes Levack restarts well before its numbers are public.

Below, I cover what Magna owns and how it sells its ore, McCreedy West’s turnaround and the stream on its precious metals, Levack and the R2 discovery, Crean Hill, the Alpayana deal, management, and the financials.

Then I conclude with what CAD$2.45/share already assumes and whether I’m buying ahead of the October studies.

P.S. Apart from my regular diligence process, I’ve listened to ~15 different YouTube video interviews since Sunday, so expect a lot more interview references in this deep dive.