Once a year, we study the demographics of the North American base- and precious-metals industry. This pro-vides us with statistics and useful insights into the changing composition of the mining world. We hope to eventually include the industrial minerals, gemstone, coal and service sectors in this analysis. There are about 2,300 nonferrous mineral companies currently headquartered in the United States and Canada. Each of these firms is exploring, developing or operating a base- or precious-metal project. About 86 percent of these companies claim gold as their dominant commodity focus, followed in distant second place, with 6.6 percent, by polymetallic companies searching primarily for zinc (and lead). Copper-molybdenum companies account for about 3 percent of the set, with the balance searching for nickel, tungsten, tin, cobalt and/or platinum group metals.
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