Let’s be upfront: Hudbay Minerals (TSX:HBM) isn’t your typical dividend play. The yield is just 0.1%, which is barely a rounding error. But the Canadian mining stock is down roughly 21% from its 52-week highs, and beneath that sell-off sits one of the most compelling copper growth stories on the TSX right now.
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A strong performance in 2025
Hudbay has been around since 1927. It’s a diversified mining company with operations in Canada, the United States, and Peru. Hudbay mines copper, gold, zinc, silver, and molybdenum.
Its flagship operations include the Constancia mine in Peru, Snow Lake gold operations in Manitoba, and the Copper Mountain mine in British Columbia.
In 2025, the company delivered its third consecutive year of record financial performance.
- Revenues topped US$2 billion.
- Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or EBITDA, crossed US$1 billion for the first time.
- Free cash flow hit nearly US$400 million, also a record.
Notably, Hudbay achieved its 11th consecutive year of meeting copper production guidance. That kind of consistency is rare in mining, an industry famous for cost blowouts and missed targets.
With total liquidity of US$990 million and US$1 billion in debt, Hudbay is well-capitalized, compared to debt-heavy peers.
In early March 2026, Hudbay announced the acquisition of Arizona Sonoran Copper Company in an all-share deal valued at roughly $1.48 billion.
The move adds the Cactus project, a large, high-grade copper deposit on private land in Southern Arizona, to Hudbay’s existing Copper World project in the same state. Combined, the two projects create the third-largest copper district in North America.
Copper is the metal that the energy transition can’t function without. Electric vehicles, AI data centres, and power grids all run on copper.
The U.S. government has already designated copper a critical mineral, and Washington is actively working to build domestic supply chains. Hudbay’s Arizona business puts it directly in the path of that policy tailwind.
The Cactus project has proven reserves of 465 million tonnes at a grade of 0.52% copper, supporting a 22-year mine life.
Based on the 2025 prefeasibility study and using a copper price of US$4.25 per pound, the project carries an after-tax net present value of US$2.3 billion at an internal rate of return of just under 23%. The acquisition premium was 30% of Arizona Sonoran’s last closing price, which was already at an all-time high.
The deal is structured to be low-risk for Hudbay. The first two years of spending on Cactus is only about US$30 million per year as the company advances permitting and a new feasibility study. Meanwhile, Copper World, the bigger near-term project, moves toward a sanctioning decision later in 2026, with first production targeted for 2029.
What next for the TSX stock?
Hudbay currently produces around 140,000 tonnes of copper per year. With Copper World, Cactus, and Mason, the company has a pipeline that could grow annual copper output to nearly 500,000 tonnes over time. That’s a more than 250% increase from where it sits today.
Management is also sharpening its capital allocation approach. It just introduced a new quarterly dividend (the company’s first-ever dividend increase), and share buybacks remain on the table.
Yes, the dividend yield is negligible at 0.1%. But investors in Hudbay aren’t buying it for income. They’re buying the undervalued TSX stock for growth in copper production, the U.S. critical-mineral positioning, and the fact that the stock is down sharply while the company’s fundamentals point in the opposite direction.
Analysts tracking the TSX mining stock forecast adjusted earnings per share to expand from US$0.67 in 2025 to US$2.91 in 2030. If Hudbay is priced at 15 times forward earnings, it could more than double over the next four years.
