The playbook — silver · September 9, 2026
Boumadine PEA update doubles NPV to $3.5B — and the market noticed
Aya's Moroccan gold-silver project posts a $3.5B after-tax NPV and 93% IRR. Most of the lift is a higher price deck, not new rock.
On September 9, Aya Gold & Silver put out an updated preliminary economic assessment — an early, back-of-envelope profitability study — for its Boumadine project in Morocco. The headline number: an after-tax net present value of $3.5 billion and a 93% internal rate of return, or the yearly percentage the project is projected to earn on the money sunk into it. The NPV doubled from the prior study. The stock had already moved: over three months AYA rose 77.5% to $41.25, while the junior silver index climbed 26.1% and silver itself gained 4.8%. That’s roughly triple the peer index and nearly sixteen times the metal — the kind of gap that points to a company-specific story, not a rising tide.
Here’s the mechanism, and it matters. The NPV did not double because Aya found more or better rock. It doubled mostly because the price deck changed — the assumed gold price went from $2,800 to $3,500 an ounce, and silver from $30 to $50. That is a price story wearing a discovery’s clothes. The geology underneath is genuinely large: a polymetallic vein system across a 6-kilometer strike, backed by 320,000 meters of drilling in 453 holes. The indicated resource grew 34% to 8.6 million tonnes at 4.02 grams per tonne gold-equivalent — about a tenth of an ounce of gold-equivalent per tonne of rock — for 1.1 million ounces. Running the company is Benoit La Salle, who founded SEMAFO in 1995 and grew it to a producer topping 250,000 ounces of gold a year before departing in 2012.
Now the honest part. About 79% of the contained metal is still inferred — the most speculative category, which the release itself says cannot support reserves. The economic study applies dollar figures to that speculative material anyway. This is a PEA, preliminary by definition; no reserves are declared and no feasibility study exists yet. The resource shapes use a 1.5-meter minimum true mining width, and isolated or discontinuous volumes were excluded. The open-pit strip ratio runs 22.6-to-one over the mine life, meaning a lot of waste rock moves for each tonne of ore. And the $463 million build cost sits against roughly US$18 million cash and US$100 million of already-drawn debt as of Q1 2025. What to watch: the NI 43-101 technical report filing (timing not stated), a mining contractor tender due H1-2027, and a feasibility study targeted for H2-2027.