Silver Wheaton (SLW) has had a rough go of things over the last few years as the recovering economy has put a squeeze on gold and silver prices. While the company’s streaming-focused business isn’t quite as directly correlated with precious metals prices as, say, a mining company like Goldcorp (GG), the market still has a major impact on the company’s well-being.

With the company’s earnings announcement, it proclaimed the quarter a “solid start to 2016,” stating that the company “realized the second best quarter ever in terms of production and sales volumes in the first quarter of 2016.” But what investors and analysts really care about is how those metrics affect the top and bottom lines. And in this case, the answer is “meh.”

Still facing an uphill battle

As you can see, Silver Wheaton has been able to combat depressed silver and gold prices by increasing its production and sales volume. The problem with that is it’s requiring a lot of costs to make it happen and it’s only partially offsetting the negative effects of the precious metals market.

Just the fact that revenues were up 43.7% while earnings were down 23% should be an indicator that Silver Wheaton is nowhere near out of the woods yet and is not fundamentally in control of the direction it goes.

But making progress

The good news, however, is that Silver Wheaton’s efforts to increase production and sales volume may just pay off. Silver prices have been off to the races in the second quarter of 2016 thus far, breaking the $18 per ounce barrier for the first time since last June. And the current price of $17.47 per ounce represents a 16.2% increase from its where it stood at the end of March.