Mining Stock Daily · Oct 16, 2026 · 1h 0m · 51m saved
With Ryan Hanley, Director of Capital Markets at Major Drilling (TSX: MDI)
Senior mining producers raised their exploration budgets by an average of 30% to 35% for 2026, after four years of roughly flat spending.
Ryan Hanley, Director of Capital Markets at Major Drilling, told Mining Stock Daily that the jump is a start, not a peak. Most coverage of the sector follows explorers and their drill results. Ryan sees the cycle from the company that supplies the rigs and the crews, and adjusted for inflation he puts global exploration budgets only where they stood at the start of the last cycle.
"If you adjust for inflation, we're probably looking at global exploration budgets comparable to where they were at the beginning of the last cycle. So I think we've got a lot of room to run... I think that we're definitely in the early innings."
Ryan spent about 12 years covering Major Drilling and its peers as a sell-side mining analyst, most recently at Laurentian Bank, before joining in 2024 as the company's first Director of Capital Markets.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 1 hour of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 8 calls that matter.
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Key Takeaways
Senior miners raised 2026 exploration budgets 30–35%, with Barrick's up 35%
Major Drilling posted the highest quarterly revenue in its 46-year history, up just over 22%
Inflation-adjusted exploration spending is only back to the start of the last cycle, well below the 2012 peak
Juniors are 15% of Major's revenue, against 35% at the last cycle's peak
The bottleneck is drillers, not rigs
Utilization is 58% against a maximum of 75%
Better AI targeting means more drilling, not less, because the money is made after a discovery
1. A Lagging Indicator
Trevor Hall, who hosts Mining Stock Daily, framed the episode as a view of the whole sector from a drilling contractor rather than an explorer. Ryan began by explaining why Major's results trail commodity prices.
Major Drilling's business picks up only after miners have rebuilt cash and juniors can raise money
"We're a little bit of a lagging indicator... as commodity prices go up, the seniors get increased free cash being generated pretty quickly, then there's a bit of a lag before the equity window opens for all the juniors to go and raise capital." — Ryan Hanley
Ryan walked through the post-2020 cycle in stages. Inflation ate into producer margins through 2021 and 2022. Miners repaired balance sheets and paid down debt through 2023, then turned to dividends and buybacks before growth and exploration finally became the focus in late 2025 and 2026.
