Hecla Mining Co. is on pace for a second consecutive profit record as the price of silver remains high while the Coeur d’Alene company’s costs of producing the precious metal keep dropping, Hecla said Wednesday.

Hecla Wednesday reported that profits for the first quarter jumped considerably over the same period last year, with net income of $8.1 million, on revenue of $53.1 million. Last year, the company had income from operations of $2.5 million in the first quarter.

“In 2006, we reported the highest earnings and lowest cash costs for silver in the history of our 116-year-old company,” Hecla president and chief executive officer Phillips S. Baker said in a press release. “We now have the potential to set another record in 2007.”

After languishing around $5 an ounce for more than a decade, silver prices have risen sharply the past couple of years because of heavy demand from industry. Silver is used in computers, cell phones, lasers, satellites and robotics.

There is also increasing demand for silver jewelry, especially in China and India.

The price of silver jumped to an average of $13.31 per ounce in the first quarter, 37 percent higher than the same period a year ago, Baker said. Prices for other metals Hecla produces, including gold (17 percent), lead (45 percent) and zinc (54 percent), also increased in the same period.

The company is on track to produce 6 million ounces of silver and 140,000 ounces of gold this year.

Baker said the company’s Lucky Friday Mine in northern Idaho and Greens Creek Mine in Alaska are doing particularly well.

As a result, Hecla revised its estimate for its annual average cost per ounce of silver from $1 to less than 50 cents per ounce.

Hecla continues to expand the century-old Lucky Friday Mine, located in Idaho’s Silver Valley near Mullan.

“A pre-feasibility study is under way to determine how the company can increase annual production, extend the mine life and increase the minable resource,” Hecla said. “Assuming a positive outcome, work would subsequently begin on a feasibility study that could result in sinking an additional surface shaft and constructing a new mill.”

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