Interview recorded August 2026. All financial figures are in Canadian dollars and reflect Q1 2026, ended March 31, 2026 — the company’s most recently reported quarter as of publication.
There is a line most silver investors eventually run into: almost nobody who calls themselves a silver miner is actually mining much silver. IMPACT Silver Corp. (TSXV: IPT | OTCQB: ISVLF) built its entire pitch around that gap. In a wide-ranging conversation with Steve Yang of Natural Resource Stocks, President and CEO Fred Davidson and VP of Finance and Investor Relations Jerry Huang laid out a case that comes down to one sentence.
“We’re a pure silver player, highly leveraged to silver. And if you believe in silver, you get more leverage out of the stock we have than you’re going to get out of silver.” — Fred Davidson.
You can watch the full discussion in the IMPACT Silver company interview, or keep reading for the highlights.
The peer problem: “silver” miners that aren’t
Huang, who tracks quarterly filings across the sector and follows BMO’s Silver Pages, put a number on it. “Hecla, First Majestic, any of the major silver players are now more of a gold and diversified player,” he said. “They obviously all report in silver equivalents. But specifically on the mid-cap side, you’re looking at maybe 50%. On the large-cap side, less than 40% really comes from silver.”
IMPACT, by Huang’s account, runs above 90% silver in most quarters — and at the flagship Zacualpan operation, Davidson estimates silver accounts for roughly 97% of the value in the rock. That is the whole argument for owning it. When silver moves, it moves straight to the bottom line, in both directions. Anyone sizing that leverage should keep an eye on the live silver spot price, because a pure-play structure cuts as sharply on the way down as it does on the way up.
Zacualpan: approaching 500 years of mining
The company’s producing asset is the Royal Mines of Zacualpan Silver-Gold District, a land package of more than 200 square kilometers in central Mexico that IMPACT has operated for 20 years. The name is not marketing. The district was mined during the era of Cortés and the Spanish conquistadors, and IMPACT describes it as one of the oldest mining districts in the Americas, with almost 500 years of continuous history — a milestone Davidson says the company intends to mark.
Several underground mines and one open pit feed the central 500-tonne-per-day Guadalupe processing plant, with the Guadalupe complex itself the largest contributor. Head grades have historically ranged from 170 to 180 grams per tonne of silver, with lead and zinc as credits. Actual throughput sits below nameplate — the Guadalupe mill processed 37,922 tonnes in Q1 2026, about 421 tonnes per day — and Davidson attributes the gap to the deposit’s geometry rather than any bottleneck in the plant.
“Because these are epithermal veins, you do development, then you can do mining, then you do mining, then you do development,” he explained. “They tend to interfere, so it’s very hard to get that number up.” Cumulative production stands at more than 13 million ounces of silver since 2006. And as Huang points out, that has come out of a fraction of the ground — the company still tests only a portion of the property each year, on an exploration budget Davidson pegs at C$2 to C$3 million annually.
The Kena vein and a record quarter
The near-term story is a newly opened structure inside the Guadalupe mine that Davidson calls the Kena vein, and it is the reason Q1 2026 looked so unusual. Average silver grade rose 60% to 251 grams per tonne, driving 268,470 ounces of silver production at Guadalupe. Combined with higher tonnage and a much stronger silver price, IMPACT generated C$31.2 million in revenue and record net income of C$11.3 million — C$0.03 per share, and nearly triple the prior-year revenue figure. Davidson is refreshingly blunt about whether that repeats. It probably does not, at least not immediately. At the time of the interview, he noted that silver had pulled back by US$20 to US$25 per ounce from its highs, and the mine sequence was swinging back toward development.
“We’ll probably see that falling off for the next quarter or two, as we do more development,” he said. “But we’re simply opening up the Kena to be bigger and better. So we’re going to see that pop up and down fairly dramatically, but I suspect it’s going to be a good, solid-looking year for the rest of the year.” That candor about lumpiness is worth noting. Narrow-vein operations do not deliver smooth quarterly curves, and investors comparing IMPACT against other junior mining stocks should expect the sawtooth.
Carlos Pacheco: the result nobody priced in
The asset Davidson seems most animated about is the Noche Buena mine, which IMPACT restarted in late 2025 and which is now being mined from the Carlos Pacheco vein system. Drilling on the northern extension of that vein has returned numbers he does not think the market absorbed.
On April 21, 2026, the company reported:
114.5 g/t gold, 1,295 g/t silver, and 1.10% copper over 0.61 meters — within a broader intercept of 9.79 g/t gold, 212 g/t silver, and 0.29% copper over 9.49 meters.
“We announced it, and I don’t think the market even understood it,” Davidson said.
The extension has kept delivering. On June 15, 2026, IMPACT reported 1,333.18 g/t silver over 5.72 meters in hole Z26-09, including 1,519.31 g/t silver over 5.45 meters. Because the mineralization is metallurgically complex, Davidson says the plan is to process it through the nearby Capire mill — a 200-plus-tonne-per-day pilot plant adjacent to an open-pit silver mine that has been on care and maintenance since it last operated in 2014 — while Guadalupe keeps running on silver-lead-zinc. He put a restart late in the first quarter of 2027, possibly slipping into the second, though the company has not issued formal guidance on that timeline. Engineers are evaluating the restart, including XRT and AI-based ore sorting to improve processing economics.
Huang argues Capire is effectively free optionality: a permitted open-pit asset he does not believe is reflected in a market capitalization of roughly C$99 million as of late July 2026. With gold and copper both in the mix at Carlos Pacheco, the gold price and copper price start to matter to a company that otherwise lives and dies on silver.
Plomosas: shut down on purpose
The third asset, Plomosas in northern Mexico’s Chihuahua state, is a high-grade zinc-lead-silver carbonate replacement deposit located in the same mineral belt as some of the world’s largest CRDs. IMPACT announced a temporary suspension of underground mining there on March 20, 2026. Davidson is candid about why.
The company inherited the operation from a previous owner whose geological model and mining method, in his words, “created all sorts of issues.” Rather than keep spending against a theory that wasn’t working, IMPACT stopped, put two rigs on the property, and brought in specialist expertise to rebuild the mining method from the ground up. “We were wasting more money and time chasing their theory. So what we did is we shut it down,” he said. “It’s what you do — you run into these things, you sit back and learn.”
That bench-strengthening became official on June 4, 2026, when IMPACT added consultants Victor Jaramillo, P.Geo. — a Vancouver-based geologist with 40-plus years across the Americas — and Chihuahua-based economic geologist Hector Gonzales, Geo.Eng., along with two staff geologists. The company describes the suspension as pending resource model and mine plan optimization, with a restart expected in the coming quarters. Meanwhile, exploration continues. The structure runs more than seven kilometers, and prior operators worked only about 600 meters of it. To the north, at a target called La Chona, trenching is returning copper and gold in what appears to be a vein-style setting rather than the limestone-hosted CRD. Davidson expects to drill it in late 2026.
Infrastructure is workable but not free. The site has road access and abundant water about 100 meters down — enough that dewatering is a chore rather than a constraint — but power comes from diesel generation, and IMPACT is evaluating solar as a replacement. On permitting, Davidson is measured. Mexico’s previous administration restricted open-pit mining unless a project could be shown to serve the national benefit. Capire is already permitted. For a potential Plomosas open-pit, sitting in an empty desert with nobody within 20 kilometers, counsel has told him it should be permissible — it will simply take time.
Team, community, and the share structure
IMPACT employs about 260 people at Zacualpan, in a district where grandfathers, fathers, sons, and daughters have all worked underground. Community support, Davidson says, has never been the issue it is in other parts of the sector. Management on the ground is entirely Mexican and, by his account, highly credentialed — the finance lead is both a CPA and a lawyer, the COO is a mining engineer, and both mine managers are engineers or geologists. Asked whether he speaks Spanish, Davidson laughed: “Badly. It’s a standing joke with my staff.”
His own background runs deep. A chartered accountant and MBA who once taught at UBC, Davidson helped build one of the first gold mines constructed in British Columbia in decades, served as CFO of Total Energold, worked on Courageous Lake for Wheaton River in the run-up to its transformation into Goldcorp, and built a drilling company with roughly 200 rigs and 800 people. IMPACT was spun out of that business, Energold Drilling. On the share structure, roughly 341.7 million shares are outstanding, with insiders holding just under 5%. Davidson’s own direct position is about 650,000 shares — all bought in the open market, because, as he explains, his cheap stock was stranded in Energold when it was taken over.
The register includes the Sprott Silver ETF, Global X, and Crescat, plus German and Swiss investors that Huang estimates at 5 to 10% of the float. Eric Sprott has come in personally on several occasions. IMPACT also completed a financing of just over C$3 million in 2025 with Samsung and Trafigura — the same global traders that buy its concentrate, shipped weekly to the port of Manzanillo.
What comes next
The balance sheet gives management room to be patient: C$49.3 million as of March 31, 2026 — C$45.3 million in cash plus C$4.0 million in GICs — and no long-term debt, against a market capitalization of roughly C$99 million. Growth comes in two forms. Internally, that means advancing Carlos Pacheco, evaluating the Capire restart, and bringing Plomosas back once the geology is properly understood. Externally, IMPACT has a small team hunting acquisitions — and a structural edge in doing so.
“These are privately owned mines, or projects, and basically, they’re simply not available unless you happen to be another Mexican who can sort of sit and have a tequila with each other,” Davidson said. Two targets are currently in due diligence; two others were dropped after a closer look. The profile he wants is a small permitted producer with a strong land position that IMPACT can expand and drill cheaply using its own rigs. Or, as Huang summarized the philosophy: “Fred always says he would mine beach sand if it made money.”
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