Here are the latest Peruvian production numbers for its five main metals, with the September 2010 numbers just published by the Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM). All the charts run from January 2009 to Sept 2010 for a bit of context and please note that the Y axes don't start at zero. Not trying to fool you into thinking something different, just moving the baselines up to allow the month-on-month contrasts to show up better.
The two biggest money-earners in Peru are (by quite some way) copper and gold. Here we see how gold production has evolved and we see that things are still depressed.
Copper is a little better, but at under 100,000mt last month (98,182mt to be exact) they're not setting any production records, either.
Zinc is at the low end of its normal fluctuations.
Lead continues to drop away quite sharply.
Silver numbers aren't that great, either.
Overall, Peru's September numbers for metals production were pretty poor, but you won't get to hear about that....what you'll get pushed at you is the rise in export revenues in gold, copper etc. This is because Peru is getting really, really lucky at the world market level and the rises in metals prices are covering the production shortfalls (for example, this.....
So remember the metals slump when you hear about the GDP growth slowdown for September that will come out in a couple of weeks time, or while reading how the country ran a fiscal deficit of U$233.3m in the same month.