Madrid/As expected, last year’s numbers from the Canadian company Sherritt In Cuba they are far below not only the results for 2024 but also the forecasts that had been set. The mining giant announced the figures this Monday in a statement, in which it also claims to work with its partner on the Island, the state-owned Energas, in a “comprehensive operational restructuring” in the Moa mines, in Holguín. Both parties analyze the “adverse operating conditions” in Cuba.
“Our efforts seek to strengthen the productivity and reliability of mine operations amidst increased geopolitical uncertainty and, ultimately, pave the way for us to obtain the maximum benefit from our expansion,” says Peter Hancock, appointed interim director of the company on December 8 in place of Leon Binedell, who had served as chief executive officer (CEO) for the previous four years.
“We will apply the same operational discipline at Moa to replicate that success in the coming years”
Since his appointment, Hancock notes, he has worked with the Cuban State “on a comprehensive operational restructuring at Moa to address the challenges we see in 2025 and support the return to consistent operational performance at the field.” The company’s energy division, he asserts, “demonstrates what can be achieved with focused operational improvements, with our dividends doubling this year to 26 million.” And he promises: “We will apply the same operational discipline at Moa to replicate that success in the coming years.”
If already in the second quarter of 2025, the company reported multi-million dollar losses –from 51.4 million dollars in the same period of the previous year to 43.7 million–, the overall results for the year follow the same trend. Sherritt expected to extract between 31,000 and 33,000 tons of nickel last year, but only achieved 25,240, which is almost 17% less than what was achieved in 2024. Of cobalt, it expected to extract 3,300 tons and however it remained at 2,729 at the end of the year, about 15% less in the year-on-year comparison.
The company cites among the main problems that the Moa plant faced in 2025 the lack of supplies, delays, prolonged blackouts that affect the entire Island and the effects of Hurricane Melissa, which crossed eastern Cuba at the end of October as a category 3 (out of 5) on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
“Sherritt working closely with its joint venture partner to anticipate and respond to potential risks”
“Sherritt is actively monitoring recent regional geopolitical events and working closely with its partner in the joint venture to anticipate and respond to potential risks,” adds the company, in clear reference to the energy crisis that is looming in Cuba following the United States intervention in Venezuela on January 3, which resulted in the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and the persecution in the Caribbean of sanctioned oil tankers.
As he warned 14ymedio William Pitt, the Canadian giant, is in trouble, and needs imported fuel to be able to work the nickel and cobalt mines it operates in Moa, the economic base of that company.
“A company that was the best foreign investment Cuba has ever had,” observed the American businessman, whose family the regime expropriated multiple mining properties in 1960. Pitt himself told this newspaper the economic disaster that Sherritt was experiencingwhose power plants and gas wells, operated in cooperation with Energieshad until now produced “the most reliable and best managed energy services” in the country.
To this he associated, in fact, the change of its management leadership. “Sherritt has lost so much money that it is suffering a revolution among its shareholders in Canada,” said the businessman when referring to the replacement of Binedell by Hancock, who Pitt described as “personnel from another competitive company.”
