Silvercorp Brand Guidelines: Spokane Resources, the Ying Silver District & Henan

A 1991 shell and a 2003 turn to China.

Silvercorp Metals has an older corporate history than its name suggests. English Wikipedia says the company was incorporated under British Columbia’s Company Act in 1991 as Spokane Resources Ltd. and traded as a small explorer on the TSX Venture Exchange from November 1991. It was renamed SKN Resources in 2001 and adopted the Silvercorp name in 2005, the same year it moved up from the venture exchange to the Toronto Stock Exchange.

The company dates its own story from 2003. Its website says Rui Feng, a geologist with a doctorate who is now chairman and chief executive, founded Silvercorp that year by acquiring early-stage properties in China. The same page credits him with a part in discovering Jinshan Gold’s CSH gold mine in China in 2002, and notes that he has also been a director and chief executive of New Pacific Metals, which took him to Bolivia in 2017.

Production followed within three years. NS Energy reported in 2020 that Silvercorp received the mining permit for the SGX mine in the Ying district in March 2006, after two years of exploration and development, and that commercial production began the following month. The HPG mine followed in January 2007, and the LME and LMW mines in March 2008. English Wikipedia adds that in June 2008 Silvercorp bought Yangtze Gold, whose Chinese subsidiary held the Gaocheng and Shimentou exploration permits in Guangdong Province.

The Ying district in Henan.

The Ying Mining District lies in Henan Province, about 145 km southwest of Luoyang and 240 km west-southwest of the provincial capital, Zhengzhou, within the Qinling orogenic belt, NS Energy reported. It groups several underground silver-lead-zinc mines, SGX, HZG, HPG, TLP, LME and LMW, with the DCG project. NS Energy counted up to 308 discrete vein structures on the property in 2020; the company now gives at least 356. Silvercorp holds the mines through Chinese companies in which it has 77.5% and 80% interests; NS Energy names Henan Found Mining as the holder of the flagship SGX mine and says SGX is the largest underground mine in the complex.

The company says Ying has been in production since 2006 and that in fiscal 2026 it produced 6.3 million ounces of silver from seven underground mines. Ore is treated at two flotation plants that make silver-lead and zinc concentrates, sold to local smelters, the company says. It describes a shift from labour-intensive methods towards mechanised mining and trackless haulage, says the district has three tailings storage facilities, the oldest of which is full and being reclaimed, and says Kuanping, 33 km north of Ying, was acquired in 2021 and is under construction. English Wikipedia calls Silvercorp China’s largest primary silver producer.

A second Chinese mine, Gaocheng, known as GC, lies in Guangdong Province about 200 km west of Guangzhou and has produced since 2014, according to the company and English Wikipedia; Wikipedia says it is held through a 95% Chinese subsidiary. The company says it is worked from a main shaft and a decline, and that since a paste backfill plant was commissioned in 2021 it has increasingly used overhand cut-and-fill mining. In Hunan Province, at BYP, about 220 km southwest of Changsha, the company says it is seeking permits for a new gold-focused operation at a site that earlier produced lead, zinc and gold-bearing pyrite concentrates.

Design and documentation.

Silver miners speak mainly to investors, governments and the communities around their mines, and their visual identities tend to follow from that audience. Palettes lean on metallic greys and silvers, often paired with a deep blue or slate, sometimes warmed by an earth tone drawn from rock or desert. Typography is usually a plain sans or a sober serif, set for long reports rather than for packaging, because there is no consumer product on a shelf to sell.

Photography carries much of the identity. Company websites and annual reports tend to show mills, headframes, haul roads and open pits set against mountain or desert landscapes, alongside portraits of workers in protective gear and views of nearby towns. Maps matter too: a miner’s portfolio is a set of places, and operation pages are commonly organised mine by mine and country by country, each with its location, ownership share, processing facilities and expected mine life.

Numbers form a second visual language. Mineral reserves and resources statements, quarterly production reports and guidance tables are published on fixed calendars, and their charts, tonnages and grades are repeated across press releases and investor presentations. Because these figures are regulated disclosures, they tend to look alike from company to company, and the brand shows mostly in the colour of a chart or the cover of a report.

The third strand is sustainability. Most listed miners keep pages on water, tailings management, energy use, community relations and human rights, often with downloadable reports and lists of the standards they say they follow. For a designer, the category is a study in restraint: a consistent palette, a clear type hierarchy and careful photography do most of the work, and the identity must hold together across a website, a technical report and a slide shown to analysts.

From Henan to Ecuador and Kyrgyzstan.

Since 2024 Silvercorp has reached beyond China. English Wikipedia says it agreed on 26 April 2024 to buy Adventus Mining and closed the deal on 31 July 2024. The company now lists the El Domo copper-gold project in central Ecuador, which it says is under construction with first production targeted for July 2027, and the Condor gold project in Zamora-Chinchipe province, which is in permitting. In January 2026 it agreed to take a 70% interest in the Tulkubash and Kyzyltash gold projects in Kyrgyzstan, English Wikipedia says; the company reports completing that acquisition on 27 January 2026, in a joint venture in which the state-owned Kyrgyzaltyn holds 30%. It plans Tulkubash, an oxide deposit, as an open-pit heap-leach operation, with the Kyzyltash sulphide deposit as a later second phase.

Silvercorp’s website calls it “a Canadian mining company headquartered in Vancouver” with 20 years of silver, gold, lead and zinc production from its mines in China, and leads with the line “Sustainable Silver for the Expanding Green Energy Sector.” Its shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange and NYSE American under the symbol SVM. The company says it has applied for a listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange; that listing had not taken place at the time of writing. It lists its values as discipline, integrity, responsibility and innovation, and highlights an in-house data platform it calls the Enterprise Blog.

For a design guide, Silvercorp shows how a miner can present itself through its districts, with project pages organised by mine, by province and by country. Compare Pan American Silver, another Vancouver silver miner, and Aya Gold & Silver, a Canadian-listed silver producer working in Morocco. For this guide we use slate, ore silver and a jade grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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