Extracts gold from Camino Rojo's oxide ore using a cyanide leaching process and sells the resulting metal bars.
At a glance
- Depends onUpstream position: supplies 5 industries, depends on 1
- ScaleMarket cap is above the global median
Extracts gold from Camino Rojo's oxide ore using a cyanide leaching process and sells the resulting metal bars.
Orla Mining extracts gold from a single deposit in Zacatecas, Mexico, called Camino Rojo, by stacking oxide ore onto large heap pads and letting cyanide solution percolate through it for months until the gold dissolves out, then refining the recovered liquid into doré bars. The whole operation was designed around one geological fact — that Camino Rojo's oxide ore is porous enough for cyanide to work without the ball mills and flotation tanks that harder sulfide deposits require, which kept the capital cost lower but also means the pads and plumbing cannot process anything other than oxide ore. Below the oxide zone lies sulfide mineralization that cyanide cannot efficiently leach, so the moment mining reaches that boundary, the infrastructure already built becomes useless and the company would need an entirely different processing plant it does not own. The oxide reserve at Camino Rojo therefore sets the outer limit of the company's productive life, and no amount of additional spending on pads or pumps can extend it once that ore is gone.
How does this company make money?
The company sells doré bars at the going gold spot price, minus the refining charges the Mexican refineries take to turn those bars into investment-grade gold. Revenue each month depends on how many bars were produced that month and where the London Bullion Market Association gold price happened to sit — a higher gold price means more revenue for the same number of ounces, and a lower price means less.
What makes this company hard to replace?
Gold refineries that buy Camino Rojo's doré bars have built specific acceptance procedures and assay relationships around that output's particular quality and characteristics. Regional supply contracts are also structured around delivery logistics tied to the Zacatecas location, and it would take an alternative supplier years to replicate those logistics efficiently enough to be a direct replacement.
What limits this company?
The cyanide solution needs months to fully dissolve the gold from the ore — that timing is set by chemistry, not by management decisions. Adding more pumps or more solution does not speed it up beyond a fixed threshold. The only way to produce more gold is to build more pad area and stack more ore, which itself takes months before any extra metal flows out.
What does this company depend on?
The company cannot operate without sodium cyanide for the leach solution, water rights and a reliable water supply in Zacatecas, a functioning electrical grid connection to run the pumps and processing equipment, Mexican federal mining permits covering the Camino Rojo site, and road access to move doré bars to refineries.
Who depends on this company?
Mexican gold refineries that process Camino Rojo's doré bars would lose a domestic supply source. Central American jewelry manufacturers who draw on regional gold supply would face higher costs if that supply shrank. Local communities in Zacatecas depend on the mining jobs and tax revenue the operation generates, and would face economic disruption if it stopped.
How does this company scale?
Adding more heap pad area and leach solution plumbing can increase how many tonnes of ore are processed at once, and the cost of doing so is fairly predictable per additional tonne of capacity. The hard ceiling, however, is the size of Camino Rojo's oxide ore body itself — once those reserves are mined out, no amount of new pad construction or capital spending can produce more oxide ore to process.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
Gold is priced in US dollars, but most of the company's day-to-day costs are paid in Mexican pesos, so swings in the peso exchange rate directly affect how profitable each ounce of gold is. Mexican environmental regulations on cyanide use and water discharge can restrict or shut down operations if rules tighten. Changes to North American trade policy could affect how freely refined gold moves across borders.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
If mining cuts through the bottom of the oxide zone and hits the sulfide rock beneath it, cyanide solution stops recovering gold efficiently. The pads, pumps, and plumbing the company has already built become useless for that ore type. To continue operating, the company would need mills and flotation equipment it does not own and has not budgeted for, while everything already spent on the heap-leach system could not be reused.
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