TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – British Columbia-focused base-metals miner Taseko widened its net loss for the first three months of the year as lower prices and higher costs impacted on the company’s performance.

Taseko posted a net loss of C$10.5-million or C$0.05 a share in the period ended March 31, a 66% drop from the C$6.3-million or C$0.03 a share loss in the same period a year earlier. The adjusted profit, excluding once-off items, plunged from C$3.1-million or C$0.02 a share in 2012, to a loss of C$2.9-million or C$0.01 a share in the first quarter.

Analysts on average had expected adjusted earnings of C$0.00 a share on revenue of C$58.34-million.

Revenue declined by 8.6% to C$60.15-million, compared with C$55.35-million in the first quarter 2012.

Copper sales in the quarter improved by 26.4% year-on-year to 16.1-million pounds, but were offset by an 8% decline in realised price to $3.47/lb. Molybdenum sales declined by 28.5% to 253 000 lbs and its price continued to slide 29% when compared with the first quarter 2012.

Total production at the company’s flagship Gibraltar mine, on a 100% basis was 23.2-million pounds of copper and 355 000 lb of molybdenum.

CEO Russell Hallbauer said the first quarter would have been the last quarter the Gibraltar operation would have operated as a single-line facility.

Following a planned ten-week commissioning schedule, Concentrator 2, which was part of the Gibraltar Development Plan III, was officially turned over to the operations team on March 28.

With Concentrator 2 now operating at about 75% of design capacity after only 35 days of operation, the site was expected to no longer be as dramatically impacted by mill downtime as it was in the past.

In April, Concentrator 2 processed about 600 000 t of ore and averaged an 83% copper recovery, and overall, the site processed just under two-million tons of ore over the same period, nearly a 30% increase over March.

Taseko is the 75%-owner and operator of the Gibraltar copper/molybdenum mine, located in south-central British Columbia, and the second-largest openpit copper mine in Canada, as well as the largest employer in the Cariboo region.

By the end of 2012, the company had invested about C$700-million to expand and modernise the operation, which was scheduled for demolition when the company acquired it in 1999.

Joint venture partner Cariboo Copper owns the remaining 25%.

The company’s stock grew 2.17% in value to C$2.35 apiece on Friday.