Fresnillo PLC (LON:FRES) on 3 December 2025: Silver Super‑Cycle Star or Overheated FTSE 100 High‑Flyer?

Fresnillo PLC’s stock has gone from sleepy mid‑cap miner to one of the loudest names on the London market in 2025, powered by record precious‑metal prices, surging profits and a bold move into Canada. As of 3 December 2025, investors are grappling with a simple but uncomfortable question: how much good news is already in the price?

Share price snapshot on 3 December 2025

At around 11:00 GMT on 3 December, Fresnillo’s London‑listed shares (FRES.L) were trading at 2,788p, up about 2.2% on the day and a staggering ~319% higher than a year ago. That puts the company’s market value near £20.8bn, with a trailing P/E ratio of about 60x and a modest dividend yield of roughly 1.2%. ^[1]

The stock is trading less than 3% below its 52‑week high of 2,850p, set on 1 December 2025, and miles above the 52‑week low of 612p recorded at the end of 2024. ^[2]

Short‑term, the ride has been just as wild:

On Monday 1 December, analysis from StockInvest notes that FRES jumped around 7% in a single session to 2,820p. ^[3]
On Tuesday 2 December, it fell 3.26% back to 2,728p, still leaving a ~19–20% gain over the previous two weeks. ^[4]
Simply Wall St calculates a 27% gain over the last 30 days and an extraordinary ~336% return over the last 12 months, underlining just how parabolic this move has been. ^[5]

In other words, this is no longer a sleepy precious‑metals stock. It’s a high‑beta macro trade hiding inside a mid‑cap mining wrapper.

Silver’s historic rally is doing the heavy lifting

The main character in Fresnillo’s 2025 story isn’t actually Fresnillo. It’s silver.

On 2 December 2025, silver prices hit a new all‑time high near $58.85/oz before profit‑taking nudged the metal back toward the mid‑$50s. MarketMinute’s deep‑dive describes a move driven by expectations of US Federal Reserve rate cuts, a weaker dollar, central‑bank demand and a severe supply squeeze amplified by industrial users. ^[6]

Proactive Investors reported earlier this week that silver hovering around $57.29/oz was enough to send Fresnillo to the top of the FTSE 100 leaderboard, with the shares up about 4% to 2,741p on 1 December. Analysts there pointed to booming demand from electric vehicles, AI hardware and solar panels, alongside thin inventories and even buyers flying in physical silver to secure supply. ^[7]

The macro narrative from precious‑metals commentators looks roughly like this: ^[8]

Rates & currency: Markets expect a Fed rate cut by December 2025 and further easing in 2026, which historically supports non‑yielding assets like gold and silver.
Industrial demand: Silver’s role in solar, electronics and medical tech gives it an extra growth kicker versus gold.
Supply constraints: Years of under‑investment and declining ore grades have limited new mine supply, tightening the market just as demand spikes.
Super‑cycle chatter: Some forecasts now talk openly about silver testing the $62–65/oz range over the coming months if the bull market continues.

Fresnillo, as the world’s largest primary silver producer and a major gold producer in Mexico, is one of the most leveraged ways to express that view, which is exactly why the stock has gone vertical. ^[9]

From “sleepy miner” to cash machine: fundamentals catch up

The rally isn’t just narrative and hot money. The company’s fundamentals have genuinely inflected.

According to Fresnillo’s 2024 annual report and subsequent coverage, profit before tax jumped from about $114m in 2023 to roughly $744m in 2024, helped by a ~29% rise in revenue to about $3.5bn and tighter control of exploration and administrative costs. ^[10]

Finimize’s breakdown of 2024 and early‑2025 results highlights several key shifts: ^[11]

Margins: High metal prices combined with a disciplined cost base pushed EBITDA margins close to 60% in the first half of 2025.
Free cash flow: Fresnillo generated over $1bn in free cash flow in just six months, dramatically improving its balance sheet flexibility.
Payout capacity: The company set new records for dividends and has ample room for both shareholder distributions and M&A, rather than simply paying down debt.

On the earnings side, the Financial Times consensus section shows 2024 EPS of around $0.364 and notes that analysts now expect the annual dividend to jump from roughly $0.31 to about $1.01 in the coming year – a more than three‑fold increase, which lines up with the surge in cash generation. ^[12]

Put bluntly: Fresnillo isn’t just riding the silver price. It’s finally printing serious money again.

Strategy shift: buying Probe Gold and going global

Perhaps the single most important strategic development in 2025 is that Fresnillo is no longer a Mexico‑only story.

On 31 October 2025, the company announced a cash offer of about $560m (C$780m) to acquire Probe Gold Inc., a Canadian gold developer listed on the TSX. ^[13]

Key points from coverage by Peace Brigades International and other mining outlets: ^[14]

The deal gives Fresnillo its first major producing foothold outside Mexico, diversifying jurisdiction risk.
Probe’s portfolio includes the Novador project, Detour Gold Quebec and other Val‑d’Or East properties – long‑life, development‑stage gold assets in a stable jurisdiction.
Probe and Fresnillo expect the transaction to close in Q1 2026, subject to the usual shareholder and regulatory approvals.

Discovery‑focused commentary frames the transaction as a $780m bet on North American gold, but also stresses the complexity of operating across two very different regulatory regimes (Mexico and Quebec), along with capital allocation tension between new Canadian projects and existing Mexican mines. ^[15]

For investors, the Probe acquisition is a two‑edged sword:

Upside: Diversified geopolitical risk, more gold exposure, and a new growth engine late this decade.
Risk: Execution risk in a new country, heavy upfront capital, and the chance that management attention is stretched just when core Mexican assets require continued investment.

ESG and legal overhang: the El Bajío dispute

The other side of Fresnillo’s story is less glamorous and very much unresolved.

Peace Brigades International and Mexican agrarian community representatives have been campaigning around the El Bajío case, linked to the Soledad‑Dipolos gold mine in Sonora. Operations there were halted after agrarian courts ruled that a Fresnillo subsidiary (Minera Penmont) had been operating illegally on communal land, ordering the company to vacate and compensate residents. ^[16]

The PBI‑Canada update on 2 December notes that: ^[17]

Community members and NGOs allege years of threats, criminalisation and even killings of defenders, though legal responsibility remains contested.
Activists continue to attend Fresnillo’s AGM in London to challenge the board over unpaid compensation said to amount to more than 13 billion pesos.
The case is cited as an emblematic example of human‑rights and environmental risk in the mining sector and a likely source of sustained ESG and reputational pressure on Fresnillo.

The TechStock² / TS² forecast article explicitly flags El Bajío as part of the “bear case” for the stock: potential for financial liabilities, project delays and a permanently higher risk premium demanded by investors who are increasingly sensitive to ESG issues. TS2 Tech

In short, Fresnillo’s meteoric share‑price performance sits alongside a complicated social and legal backdrop that could still bite.

What the analysts are saying on 3 December 2025

Despite the share price hovering near record highs, broker sentiment is more cautious than euphoric.

From the Financial Times’ aggregated forecasts: ^[18]

11 analysts cover Fresnillo.
The median 12‑month price target is 2,303.79p, with a high of 3,005.37p and a low of 1,201.85p.
That median implies about a 15–16% downside from the last reference price of 2,728p.
The rating mix (as of late November) is skewed toward “Hold”, with only a minority outright “Buy” recommendations.

MarketBeat’s forecast page for FRES.L (updated in early December) shows a similar picture: ^[19]

5 analysts: 3 Buy, 2 Hold, 0 Sell – summarized as “Moderate Buy”.
Average target price ~2,308p, with a range of 1,400p–3,000p.
Given the current price around 2,788p, that average target sits roughly 15–20% below spot.

On the US OTC listing FNLPF, Fintel’s compilation of analyst forecasts puts the average one‑year target at $28.53, with estimates spanning $15.98–$37.38 and a projection date of November 2026. ^[20]

Fair‑value models on platforms like Yahoo Finance and Simply Wall St have nudged their estimates up slightly (e.g., from around £24.10 to £24.24 per share), but still below the current market price, even as they project earnings growth far ahead of the broader market. ^[21]

The TS² forecast article stitches this together neatly:

On forward earnings, Fresnillo can look relatively cheap (a forward P/E around 9–10x if current metal prices hold, versus peers trading in the mid‑20s).
On trailing metrics and versus consensus targets, the stock no longer looks like a deep‑value contrarian play; much of the good news appears already reflected in the price. TS2 Tech

Momentum, technicals and sentiment

From a technical angle, the stock is flashing bright green – which is, paradoxically, what makes some traders nervous.

StockInvest’s short‑term model notes that FRES has delivered ~19–20% gains in two weeks, with large intraday swings and a recent pullback on falling volume (often read as a healthy sign rather than panic selling). ^[22]

For the US listing FNLPF, Macrotrends records an all‑time high closing price of $37.23 on 1 December 2025, with a 52‑week high of $39.00, just under 5% above that level. ^[23]

Technical indicators tracked by Investing.com currently show a “Strong Buy” on the daily timeframe for FRES, with multiple moving averages and oscillators pointing to continued bullish momentum and virtually no active sell signals. ^[24]

At the index level, Fresnillo has repeatedly popped up as a key driver of FTSE 100 moves:

On 26 November, Reuters highlighted a session where precious‑metal miners led UK markets higher as gold strengthened, with Fresnillo up nearly 4% in a single day. ^[25]
Proactive’s 1 December market report, as noted earlier, had Fresnillo sitting at the very top of the FTSE 100 as silver pressed against record highs. ^[26]

So the message from the charts is simple: this is a momentum stock strongly tied to every tick of the gold and silver markets.

2026 scenarios: bull vs bear

The TS² 2026 stock‑forecast article lays out a structured bull and bear case that captures the current debate. TS2 Tech

Bull case – still room to run

The optimistic scenario rests on four pillars:

Metals stay structurally higher
Central‑bank buying, geopolitical uncertainty and inflation worries keep gold elevated, while silver continues to benefit from both monetary demand and industrial use – from solar panels to AI hardware – amid tight supply. ^[27]
Cost discipline continues
If Fresnillo can sustain the kind of cost control that produced near‑60% EBITDA margins and >$1bn H1 2025 free cash flow, earnings could remain very strong even if metal prices merely hold around current levels. ^[28]
Probe Gold becomes a growth engine
Successful closure and build‑out of Probe’s Québec assets would add a new, large, long‑life gold source in a politically stable jurisdiction, raising gold’s share of Fresnillo’s revenue and reducing Mexico concentration risk. ^[29]
Valuation re‑rates on forward earnings
If metal prices remain elevated and Fresnillo hits or beats its 2025‑26 guidance, a forward P/E around 9–10x could look too low versus other high‑quality precious‑metal producers trading at far richer multiples. TS2 Tech+1

Under this view, Fresnillo is still a levered, relatively cheap way to bet on a multi‑year precious‑metals super‑cycle, now with an added Canadian leg.

Bear case – priced for perfection

The cautionary scenario focuses on everything that could go wrong from here:

Rally fatigue and compressed targets
Many major brokers now publish targets below the live share price, a classic sign that the stock has run ahead of what the analyst community considers fair value in the near term. ^[30]
Mean reversion in metal prices
Silver near $60/oz and gold at fresh records are, by definition, extreme readings. A 15–20% pull‑back in metal prices could translate into a much bigger percentage drawdown for Fresnillo’s equity, especially if sentiment flips from “safe‑haven darling” to “over‑owned commodity trade.” ^[31]
Legal and ESG risk crystallising
A negative turn in the El Bajío dispute – whether through court decisions, regulatory action or reputational damage – could mean unexpected costs or delays, and reinforce investor scepticism about ESG risk in the portfolio. ^[32]
Probe and international execution risk
Fresnillo has never operated beyond Mexico. Integrating a Canadian development pipeline, with new regulatory, cultural and technical challenges, introduces risk just as demand on management time intensifies at home. ^[33]

In this lens, Fresnillo at late‑2025 levels is “priced for a lot of good news” – strong metals, smooth Probe integration, no major legal upsets and stable politics. That’s a lot of assumptions to lean on.

So what does 3 December 2025 really mean for Fresnillo stock?

Putting it all together:

The good news: Fresnillo is generating more cash than it has in years, has restored its growth pipeline with the Probe acquisition, and sits at the epicentre of what could be a generational bull market in silver. Balance sheet strength, soaring earnings and rapidly rising dividends all support the long‑term bull case. ^[34]
The uncomfortable news: At about 2,788p, the stock trades on a lofty trailing P/E of ~60x, near its all‑time highs, while most major price targets sit 15–20% below the current price. Technicals scream “Strong Buy,” but that’s often when risk is highest for new entrants. ^[35]
The wildcards: Legal and ESG issues in Mexico, the complexity of moving into Canada, and the inherently volatile nature of precious‑metal prices all mean that Fresnillo’s future path is unlikely to be smooth, even if the long‑term trend for silver remains up. ^[36]

For investors who truly believe in a multi‑year gold‑and‑silver super‑cycle and who can tolerate substantial volatility and ESG complexity, Fresnillo remains one of the purest and most leveraged plays on that thesis going into 2026. TS2 Tech

For more cautious investors, the combination of: