KGHM Polska Miedz produced 1,347 tonnes of silver in 2025, making it the second largest silver producer on earth. Silver accounts for 14% of the company's revenue and drives USD 1.2 billion in annual Polish silver exports. The marginal cost to KGHM of that silver is essentially zero above the copper mining costs already incurred. The market does not price it that way. This is the investment case nobody is writing. KGHM Polska Miedz wyprodukowala 1 347 ton srebra w 2025 roku, plasujac ja jako drugiego co do wielkosce producenta srebra na swiecie. Srebro stanowi 14% przychodow firmy i napedza 1,2 miliarda USD rocznego polskiego eksportu srebra. Kracowy koszt tego srebra dla KGHM wynosi zasadniczo zero ponad juz poniesione koszty wydobycia miedzi. Rynek nie wycenia tego w ten sposob.
This article is produced by Fides Polonia Capital Management for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell any security, or a solicitation. KGHM Polska Miedz SA (WSE: KGH) is a publicly listed company. Fides Polonia Capital Management may hold or consider holding positions in securities mentioned. Always conduct independent due diligence and consult a qualified financial adviser before making any investment decision. Niniejszy artykul jest produkowany przez Fides Polonia Capital Management wylacznie w celach informacyjnych i edukacyjnych. Nie stanowi porady inwestycyjnej, rekomendacji kupna lub sprzedazy jakiegokolwiek papieru wartosciowego ani zachety.
Pull up KGHM Polska Miedz on any financial data platform. The sector tag says mining. The commodity tag says copper. The analyst notes discuss copper production volumes, copper prices, and copper capex. The index classification in the WIG20 reflects its status as a copper and metals company. All of this is accurate. KGHM's primary business is copper, and copper represents 70.3% of net sales. The company operates three underground copper mines in Lower Silesia, two smelters, and a wire rod plant, and its copper output of 729,700 tonnes in 2024 places it among the largest copper producers in Europe and the world's top ten. That story is well told.
What is not well told is the silver story that comes bundled with the copper. KGHM produced 1,347 tonnes of silver in 2025, making it the second largest silver producer on earth, behind only Mexico's Fresnillo. It held the number one position in the World Silver Survey's ranking of the largest silver-producing mines, with its Polish operations at Lubin, Rudna, and Polkowice-Sieroszowice collectively producing an estimated 43.3 million ounces in 2024. Silver represents 14% of the company's total revenue. Poland's silver exports reached USD 1.2 billion in 2024. None of this appears prominently in the standard KGHM investment narrative, because the standard KGHM investment narrative was written by copper analysts and for copper investors. The silver is a structural feature of the ore body, not a strategic choice that gets strategic attention.
Approximately 72% of all global metallic silver production is a by-product of mining ores of other metals, primarily copper, lead, and zinc. Silver does not typically form its own concentrated ore bodies at economic grade. Instead, silver atoms sit within the crystal structure of copper, lead, and zinc minerals, and they come out during the smelting and refining process whether the miner intended to produce silver or not. At most copper operations, the silver content is relatively modest and the silver revenue is a small fraction of the total. At KGHM's operations in Lower Silesia, the silver content is unusually high, a geological characteristic of the specific Kupferschiefer ore formation that underlies the Lubin, Rudna, and Polkowice-Sieroszowice mines.
The Kupferschiefer, a black bituminous shale deposit, has been known as a source of copper and silver since medieval times. Silesian miners were extracting silver from this formation in the thirteenth century. The scale of the modern operation, which KGHM has developed since the 1950s, simply processes this ore at volumes that dwarf anything the medieval miners could have imagined. When KGHM mines copper ore from a kilometre underground and processes it through its Glogow smelter and refinery, the silver that was embedded in that ore comes out as a by-product at the refining stage. KGHM does not choose to produce silver. It has no option not to. The silver is physically inseparable from the copper production process. This is what makes the economics of KGHM's silver so distinctive compared to a dedicated silver miner like Fresnillo, which must find, develop, and sustain silver ore bodies specifically, incurring all the capital and operating costs of a standalone silver mining operation.
Silver is produced as a by-product of copper extraction at KGHM's Lubin, Rudna and Polkowice-Sieroszowice operations and refined at the Glogow smelter, which has been processing precious metals from copper ore since 1993. The company sells silver in two primary forms: granulated silver for industrial customers who require it in a form suitable for direct manufacturing use, and bullion bars registered under the brand KGHM HG, primarily supplied to financial institutions, with smaller bars for private investors introduced more recently. The KGHM HG brand is listed on the London Bullion Market Association, giving it international recognition and allowing LBMA benchmark pricing to apply directly to KGHM's silver sales. Silver bars from a copper mine in Poland are traded in London under the same pricing framework as silver from dedicated silver mines in Mexico and Peru. Srebro jest produkowane jako produkt uboczny wydobycia miedzi w zakladach KGHM Lubin, Rudna i Polkowice-Sieroszowice i rafinowane w hucie Glogow, ktora przetwarza metale szlachetne z rudy miedzi od 1993 roku. Firma sprzedaje srebro w dwoch glownych formach: granulowane srebro dla klientow przemyslowych oraz sztabki zarejestrowane pod marke KGHM HG, glownie dostarczane do instytucji finansowych.
The World Silver Survey is the authoritative annual ranking of global silver production, prepared by the GFMS team at Thomson Reuters and widely regarded as the definitive industry data source. In the 2025 survey covering 2024 production, KGHM ranked second globally with 1,341 tonnes. In the 2026 survey covering 2025 production, KGHM again ranked second with 1,347 tonnes. In the mine-level ranking, KGHM's Polish operations collectively hold the top position globally. To put this in perspective: KGHM produces more silver than Pan American Silver, one of the few dedicated silver companies large enough to be widely covered in international investment media. It produces more than Polymetal, more than South32's Cannington operation, and more than Hecla Mining, the largest primary silver producer in the United States. The companies that rank below KGHM are companies that investors, analysts, and precious metals media follow intensively as silver investments. KGHM, which out-produces them, is not covered in the same context.
| ProducerProducent | 2024 Output (tonnes)Produkcja 2024 (tony) | Primary ClassificationKlasyfikacja Pierwotna | Silver CoveragePokrycie Srebra |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fresnillo (Mexico) | 1,496t (World No. 1) | Silver miner | Extensive |
| KGHM Polska Miedz | 1,341t (World No. 2) | Copper miner | Minimal |
| Newmont (Penasquito) | 935t | Gold miner | Moderate |
| Pan American Silver | ~800t est. | Silver miner | Extensive |
| Fresnillo (Saucito mine) | 506t | Silver miner | Extensive |
| South32 (Cannington) | 442t | Diversified miner | Moderate |
| Hecla Mining | ~350t est. | Silver miner | Extensive |
The coverage disparity is not subtle. Type KGHM into a silver-focused investment publication's search bar and you will find occasional mention as a statistical footnote in production tables. Type Fresnillo or Pan American Silver and you will find dozens of investment theses, analyst upgrades, commodity notes, and sector overviews. The production volumes do not match the coverage volumes at all. KGHM produces more than three times as much silver as South32's Cannington, one of the most frequently discussed silver assets in mining investment media. It produces nearly four times as much as Hecla Mining, the US silver standard-bearer. The coverage ratio is roughly inverted.
The most important economic characteristic of KGHM's silver production is that the marginal cost of producing it is effectively zero. This requires some explanation, because it sounds too good to be straightforward.
KGHM incurs the costs of mining copper ore, transporting it to the surface, processing it through concentrators, and smelting and refining it into copper cathodes and copper wire rod. These costs are substantial and are tracked, disclosed, and analysed in detail by copper market analysts. None of those costs change whether the ore contains silver or not. The copper mining, processing, smelting, and refining operations would proceed in exactly the same way, at exactly the same cost, even if the silver content of the ore were zero. The silver recovery at the refinery stage is an additional step in the refining process, but it uses the existing Glogow refinery infrastructure and does not require a separate mine, separate workforce, separate permits, or separate capital expenditure programme. KGHM does not allocate meaningful standalone capital or operating costs to silver production, because silver production is an inseparable output of the copper refining process that was already going to happen for copper reasons.
What this means in practice is that when the silver price rises by one dollar per ounce, approximately 43.3 million ounces of KGHM's silver output for 2024 become worth an additional USD 43.3 million annually, with no corresponding increase in KGHM's costs. The silver price sensitivity is essentially pure revenue upside. A ten dollar per ounce increase in silver price, which is not a particularly large move in the context of silver's historical volatility, translates to roughly USD 433 million in additional annual revenue for KGHM with no cost offset. This is an unusually clean leverage mechanism to the silver price, and it is available to investors through KGHM shares at a valuation that reflects copper economics rather than silver economics.
Silver has historically been discussed in investment media primarily as a monetary metal, a store of value that tracks gold and responds to inflation and dollar weakness. That framing is outdated in a way that matters for the demand picture. Silver is genuinely unusual among metals because it is simultaneously an investment commodity, a precious metal with jewellery and silverware applications, and an industrial metal with properties that make it irreplaceable in a growing range of applications. In 2025, global silver demand is expected to reach 1.2 billion ounces, with over half of that total coming from industrial fabrication at 700 million ounces. Industry's share of silver demand has been growing for a decade and is expected to continue growing for the rest of this one.
The specific industrial applications driving this are exactly the technologies that dominate current investment narratives about the energy transition. Photovoltaic solar cells require silver paste as an electrical conductor. Each solar panel contains approximately 20 grams of silver on average, and global solar installation capacity has been growing at 30 to 40 percent per year. Electric vehicles use silver in their charging systems, battery management systems, and power electronics. Every smartphone contains approximately 0.3 grams of silver in its circuitry, connectors, and sensors. 5G infrastructure uses silver in its antenna arrays and switching equipment. These applications are not optional alternatives to silver that could be engineered away cheaply. Silver's electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, and reflectivity are either the highest or among the highest of all metals, giving it physical properties that make substitution genuinely difficult in precision electrical applications.
The supply picture is not keeping pace. Global silver mine production totalled approximately 25,000 to 26,000 tonnes in 2024 and 2025, a figure that has been relatively flat for several years. Most new silver production comes as a by-product of lead, zinc, and copper mining and therefore does not respond quickly to silver price signals. A higher silver price does not, in the short term, cause significantly more silver to be produced, because the decision to increase silver output at most operations requires increasing copper, lead, or zinc output first, which depends on those metals' own economics and market conditions. The combination of structurally growing industrial demand and relatively inelastic mine supply is the macroeconomic backdrop against which KGHM's 1,347 tonnes of annual production sits as an asset.
KGHM is currently planning a major shaft expansion at the Rudna mine in Lower Silesia, one of the world's largest underground copper operations. Plans call for sinking a new shaft that could take up to twelve years to complete, with a price tag of several billion zloty depending on final depth and technical specifications. The expansion is driven by copper production ambitions: deeper ore bodies in the Kupferschiefer formation will extend the mine's producing life and increase its annual copper output. The silver implication is automatic and structural. More copper ore processed means more silver recovered at the Glogow refinery. The shaft expansion is not described as a silver investment. It is a copper investment. But it is simultaneously a multi-billion zloty commitment to the production infrastructure that generates KGHM's silver output, and every tonne of additional copper ore processed will bring with it the silver content embedded in that ore at the Kupferschiefer's characteristic grade.
This is the silver asset embedded within a copper company's capital allocation decision. An investor in KGHM who pays attention to the copper narrative is also, without necessarily knowing it, backing the ongoing development of one of the world's largest silver-producing operations. The Rudna expansion will extend and grow that silver output with no standalone silver capex required, no separate silver mining permit process, no silver-specific workforce hiring, and no silver market risk assessment in the investment decision. The silver grows because the copper grows. The economics of the two metals are bundled together in the ore body in a way that the equity market has not fully disaggregated in its pricing of KGHM shares.
The case made in this article is not complicated. KGHM produces 1,347 tonnes of silver per year. It is second only to Fresnillo globally. Silver represents 14% of its revenue and drives USD 1.2 billion in annual Polish exports. The marginal cost of that silver is effectively zero because it comes out of the copper refining process regardless. The silver price sensitivity is pure revenue upside with no cost offset. Industrial silver demand is growing driven by solar, EVs, and electronics. Mine supply is inelastic. The Rudna expansion will increase copper and silver output over the next decade. The equity market treats KGHM as a copper company and applies copper valuation frameworks to it. Dedicated silver miners with significantly lower production volumes trade at valuation premiums that reflect investor demand for silver exposure. KGHM offers more silver production than most of those miners at a price that does not explicitly credit the silver asset. Przypadek przedstawiony w tym artykule nie jest skomplikowany. KGHM produkuje 1 347 ton srebra rocznie. Jest drugi tylko po Fresnillo globalnie. Srebro stanowi 14% jego przychodow i napedza 1,2 miliarda USD rocznego polskiego eksportu. Kracowy koszt tego srebra jest efektywnie zerowy, poniewaz wychodzi z procesu rafinacji miedzi bez wzgledu na wszystko. Rynek akcji traktuje KGHM jak firme miedziowa i stosuje ramy wyceny miedzi.
This is not a simple recommendation to buy KGHM shares. KGHM has its own set of risks that copper analysts have written about extensively: the Sierra Gorda mine in Chile has been a source of write-downs and operational complexity for years, labour relations at the Polish operations carry ongoing negotiation risk, the Polish state's 31.79% shareholding creates political influence on capital allocation decisions, and the copper price itself is volatile. None of those risks disappear because the silver asset is underappreciated. What this article argues is narrower: that any investor already interested in silver exposure through an equity vehicle should be aware that the world's second largest silver producer is sitting in the WIG20, classified as a copper company, producing USD 1.2 billion worth of silver annually at essentially zero marginal cost, and receiving essentially no credit for that in the way the market discusses and prices the stock. To nie jest prosta rekomendacja kupna akcji KGHM. KGHM ma wlasny zestaw ryzyk. Jednak kazdy inwestor zainteresowany ekspozycja na srebro przez instrument kapitalowy powinien zdawac sobie sprawe, ze drugi co do wielkosci producent srebra na swiecie siedzi w WIG20, sklasyfikowany jako firma miedziowa, produkujac 1,2 miliarda dolarow srebra rocznie przy zasadniczo zerowym koszcie kracowym, i nie otrzymujac za to zadnego kredytu w sposobie, w jaki rynek omawia i wycenia akcje.
This article is produced by Fides Polonia Capital Management for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell any security, or a solicitation of any kind. KGHM Polska Miedz SA (WSE: KGH) is a publicly listed company on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Silver production figures sourced from the World Silver Survey 2025 and 2026, KGHM official corporate disclosures, and industry press as cited. Fides Polonia Capital Management may hold or consider holding positions in KGHM Polska Miedz SA or related securities. Nothing in this article should be relied upon as the sole basis for any investment decision. Always conduct independent due diligence and consult a qualified, regulated financial adviser in your jurisdiction before making any investment. Niniejszy artykul jest produkowany przez Fides Polonia Capital Management wylacznie w celach informacyjnych i edukacyjnych. Nie stanowi porady inwestycyjnej, rekomendacji kupna lub sprzedazy jakiegokolwiek papieru wartosciowego ani zadnego rodzaju zachety. Inwestowanie w akcje wiaze sie z ryzykiem utraty kapitalu. Zawsze przeprowadzaj niezalezna analize i skonsultuj sie z kwalifikowanym doradca finansowym przed podjaciem jakiejkolwiek inwestycji.