Teck Resources Q3 Earnings Beat on Record Copper Prices, With a Strike Live at Highland Valley
Teck Resources Limited released its Q3 2026 earnings overnight, after Wednesday’s close and before Thursday’s open, with the investor call at 11:00 a.m. ET. Adjusted basic earnings per share were $1.88 against a Yahoo Finance consensus of $1.58, a beat of about 19%, and adjusted EBITDA of $2,305 million was “$1.1 billion or 97% higher than the same period last year” (p. 1).
That is ten consecutive quarters ahead of consensus, and the narrowest beat since July 2024: the eight in between ran from 34% to 76%, on our count.
| Three months ended September 30, CAD millions except per share | Q3 2026 | Q3 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $4,517 | $3,385 |
| Adjusted EBITDA | $2,305 | $1,171 |
| Profit attributable to shareholders | $1,592 | $281 |
| Adjusted profit attributable to shareholders | $923 | $372 |
| Basic earnings per share | $3.24 | $0.58 |
| Adjusted basic earnings per share | $1.88 | $0.76 |
| Cash flow from operations | $1,590 | $647 |
Source: Teck Resources Limited 2026 Third Quarter News Release, pp. 8-9.
One item explains the gap between reported and adjusted profit
The after-tax reconciliation on p. 8 is dominated by one entry: an asset impairment reversal of $667 million after tax, $888 million pre-tax, at Trail Operations, booked on “higher expectations for long-term commodity prices and strengthening market fundamentals for strategic metals” plus improved profitability from an optimized feed strategy (p. 20). Teck recognised $130 million of deferred tax assets as a consequence.
On the 490.56 million shares outstanding that reversal is worth about $1.36 a share, our arithmetic, and it outlives the quarter. Trailing earnings of $7.76 a share now include it, so the 11.4 times that Wednesday’s $88.10 close works out to against them contains the $1.36 too. Take the reversal out and the same close is about 13.8 times, our arithmetic. Our guide to how to read the reconciliation in a company’s own report shows where that table sits in a filing.
Below it sits another line. Settlement pricing adjustments are the mark to market on concentrate sold at provisional prices and settled later, so they move with copper (p. 23). They produced $101 million of after-tax gains, $0.21 a share, and are not removed from adjusted profit (p. 8). Before tax they were $202 million, against $108 million in the same quarter last year (p. 23). The beat over consensus was $0.30 a share. The same line runs the other way when copper falls, and Teck closed the quarter with 253 million payable pounds of copper still priced provisionally (p. 23).
Three quarters of the copper profit increase is the price
Copper segment gross profit rose to $1,223 million from $355 million, and Teck’s bridge for the $868 million increase prints the realized copper price first at $664 million, then smelter processing charges at $47 million, sales volumes at $29 million and unit operating costs at $62 million, ahead of four smaller lines (p. 12). The price line alone is 76.5% of the increase, our arithmetic.
Teck’s own bridge for the change in copper segment gross profit. Source: 2026 Third Quarter News Release, p. 12.
Teck’s realized price was US$6.41 a pound against US$4.45 (p. 11). The LME cash price behind it averaged US$6.40, up 44.1% year on year, with spot reaching “new all-time nominal highs in September in excess of US$6.70 per pound” (p. 12). The market section around that figure describes a concentrate market that kept tightening, with Chilean production in August at its lowest since 2011 and Chinese refined output falling year on year for the first time since 2022, against demand Teck calls robust on grid spending, robotics and battery storage (pp. 12-13). Copper net cash unit costs fell to US$1.77 a pound from US$2.09 on “strong cost performance and lower smelter processing charges” (pp. 1 and 16).
The mines, and the one on strike
Consolidated production of 116 thousand tonnes, against 104, hides four different stories. Teck reports 100% of Quebrada Blanca and Carmen de Andacollo, which it does not wholly own but fully consolidates, and 22.5% of Antamina (p. 9).
Source: 2026 Third Quarter News Release, pp. 42-43. The 22.5% apportionment of Antamina is ours.
Quebrada Blanca’s 47,200 tonnes is a sequential fall from 55,800 tonnes in the second quarter, after August weather and power outages shut the concentrator and wet conditions cut access to higher-grade ore, and its grade was 0.55% against 0.60% a year earlier. It beats last year’s quarter, but that one carried 20 days of downtime to raise the tailings dam crest (pp. 11-13 and 42). Carmen de Andacollo more than halved, to 5,700 tonnes from 12,900, after heavy rainfall and flooding forced “an extended suspension of operations and a phased restart”, though it was back at full production by the end of September (p. 15).
Antamina lifted copper production by 18,700 tonnes to 123,000 on a 100% basis, on grades of 1.02% against 0.86%, while its zinc output fell by 70% to 38,500 tonnes as it processed a lower ratio of copper-zinc ore than a year earlier (pp. 7, 15 and 43). A fatality occurred there on October 27, and Teck says it is “fully participating in the Antamina led investigation” with its partners BHP, Glencore and Mitsubishi (p. 4).
Highland Valley’s increase came on grades of 0.41% against 0.29% and softer Lornex ore, despite wildfire power cuts and a seven-day August water shutdown (pp. 14 and 42). It is also where the risk that is live right now sits. The collective agreement with United Steelworkers Local 7619 expired on September 30, Teck received strike notice on October 21, and strike action commenced on Saturday, October 24. Teck discloses it three times (pp. 7, 14 and 82).
“Operations are currently continuing at a reduced capacity”, the MD&A says, then, introduced by “However”, that it still expects HVC’s annual copper production “to be towards the high end of our previously disclosed guidance range”, and only then that “the impact on overall production will depend on the duration of the labour action” (p. 14). The order is the company’s argument.
The numbers size the risk it leaves open. Highland Valley’s own 2026 range is 115,000 to 135,000 tonnes and the mine produced 118,200 tonnes in the first nine months, already past the bottom (pp. 16 and 42). The top needs about 16,800 tonnes in the fourth quarter, our subtraction, under half of the 35,200 tonnes it produced in the third. The high-end expectation carries its own stated basis, “based on strong operational performance through September 30, 2026 at HVC”, and the company already expects “lower grades, mill throughput and recoveries” in the fourth quarter as it processes less Lornex ore and completes mill upgrade work for the Mine Life Extension (p. 16). The strike threatens the top of that range rather than the range itself. For scale, Highland Valley averaged about 2,700 tonnes of copper a week in the third quarter, roughly US$38 million at the quarter’s realized price, our arithmetic, and the mine is running at reduced capacity rather than stopped. It matters beyond this quarter because Highland Valley is also where that $2.1 billion to $2.4 billion Mine Life Extension is being built, $900 million to $1.2 billion of it this year, past 25% construction progress during the quarter (pp. 14-15).
Group copper guidance stays at 455,000 to 530,000 tonnes, with Carmen de Andacollo at the low end of its own 45,000 to 55,000 tonne range (pp. 5 and 16). Copper net cash unit cost guidance falls to US$1.80 to US$2.00 a pound from US$1.85 to US$2.20 (p. 4).
The share price is not the scoreboard for any of this
Teck and Anglo American announced a merger of equals on September 9, 2025, under which Teck holders receive 1.3301 Anglo shares per Teck share and no part of Anglo’s special dividend of roughly US$4.19 a share. The approvals are not all in: Teck says the two companies “continue to work collaboratively toward securing the required approvals” and that the deal “remains on track to close within the originally stated 12–18 months” of the announcement, which runs out in March 2027 (p. 2). Our October 5 piece on the conditions Teck’s merger with Anglo American still has to clear described Teck as trading above its merger terms, and October’s run of discounts is what has changed since.
That agreement is also why almost none of this quarter’s cash reaches shareholders. Capital returned was $61 million, the base quarterly dividend of $0.125 a share, against liquidity of $10.9 billion including $6.7 billion of cash (pp. 9, 25). The arrangement agreement bars dividends above $0.125 per share per fiscal quarter “without the prior approval of Anglo American”, and there have been no buybacks since July 25, 2025 under it (pp. 25, 27).
The ratio is fixed, so a quarter like this one changes nothing about what a Teck holder would receive. It makes a Teck share a claim on 1.3301 Anglo shares, and the trading data behaves accordingly. We measured how much of Teck’s daily move travels with Anglo’s across two windows of 282 paired sessions each, converting Anglo into Canadian dollars. From July 17, 2024 to September 8, 2025 the R-squared was 0.25 on a slope of 0.57. From September 9, 2025 to October 28, 2026 it is 0.64 on a slope of 0.93, so about two thirds of Teck’s daily variation now moves with Anglo, at close to one for one. London closes four and a half hours before Toronto, equally in both windows.
The obvious objection is sector beta: Teck and Anglo are both copper miners, and copper has run. Over the same two windows, against the median daily return of seven other large Canadian copper names, Lundin, First Quantum, Hudbay, Capstone, Ero, Ivanhoe and Taseko, Teck’s R-squared falls from 0.72 to 0.63 on 286 paired sessions each, our regression. It moved away from its own sector over the window in which it moved toward Anglo.
R-squared of Teck class B daily returns in two matched windows either side of the September 9, 2025 announcement. Our calculation.
That leaves the merger spread as the one place Teck-specific news can land: the premium or discount of Teck’s close to the consideration. Across the 283 sessions since September 8, 2025, the day before the announcement, the median is a discount of 1.23%.
Premium or discount of Teck’s close to the merger consideration, October 2026. Our calculation on the 1.3301 ratio.
Teck closed at a premium of 1.11% on October 20. On October 21, the day it received strike notice, the spread was 0.10% below the consideration. On October 26, the first session after the strike began, it sat 1.35% below, essentially its long-run median, and by October 28 it was back to a premium of 1.21%. None of that is causal, because other things moved in those sessions too, and it is modest next to the widest premium of 2026, 3.63% on October 2, the day Reuters reported China’s conditions for clearing the deal, a move we could not pin on that report at the time.
Between the October 20 close of $90.51 and the October 22 close of $82.58 Teck fell 8.8%, while the spread moved about 1.4 percentage points. The value of the Anglo consideration fell 7.5% across the same two sessions, so the share price did something violent and the 1.4 points of difference is the whole of what was Teck’s own, our arithmetic on those closes.
What actually changes from here
Two items sit in the back of the document and neither shows up in the headline numbers. Chile enacted legislation on October 9, after the quarter closed, cutting its corporate tax rate from 27% to 23% between 2027 and 2029, and Teck estimates a one-time charge of $70 million from remeasuring its Chilean loss carryforwards (p. 82). The lower rate then applies to Quebrada Blanca and Carmen de Andacollo, Teck’s two Chilean mines.
Trail is the other. The $888 million reversal sits inside the zinc segment, where gross profit rose to $465 million from $305 million on a realized zinc price of US$1.70 a pound against US$1.29 (p. 18), and germanium dioxide, a Trail by-product, reached record prices in the quarter (pp. 19-20). What is being built there is a critical minerals business: in July Teck signed an agreement with Canada Growth Fund and Natural Resources Canada framing an equity-like investment of up to $400 million into the smelter, inside a potential $850 million total and subject to definitive documentation, with Ottawa taking offtake rights over a portion of future germanium, antimony and gallium (pp. 20-21).
Then the strike, whose duration decides whether Highland Valley finishes at the top of its range or inside it. A quarter this strong tells a Teck shareholder less than it should, because about two thirds of its daily variation now moves with Anglo and the dividend is pinned at $0.125 until the deal closes. What it does show is what record copper does to a producer’s margins when costs hold, and Teck is one of several names on the TSX carrying that exposure: we rank them in our coverage of Canadian mining stocks.
Data as of October 28, 2026. Company figures come from the 2026 Third Quarter News Release and its accompanying announcement, with the page cited at each use. Share price and the C$43.22 billion market capitalisation: StockAnalysis at the October 28 close of $88.10, cross-checked against Yahoo Finance. The trailing earnings behind the multiple are current and include this quarter. Consensus and surprise history: Yahoo Finance. The exchange ratio, the regressions and the spread are ours.
Disclaimer: The content on bestcanadianstocks.ca is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions. Every Teck figure is from the company’s own ‘Teck Resources Limited 2026 Third Quarter News Release’, the 82-page document published with its results on October 29, 2026, with the printed page cited at each use. The strike dates and language are from Teck’s own news releases of October 21 and October 24, 2026. Analyst consensus and the surprise history are Yahoo Finance. The October 28, 2026 closing price, market capitalisation and trailing price-to-earnings ratio are from StockAnalysis, cross-checked against Yahoo Finance. The exchange ratio arithmetic, the premium to the merger terms over 283 sessions and the two era-matched tracking regressions are our own.
