India and China’s love affair with gold turns financial

24-Oct (FT) — For Surender Kumar Jindal, one of the biggest sellers of gold and silver bars in India, this year has not been good for business.

Gold may have rallied 20 per cent in US dollar terms, putting it on course for its first annual rise in four years. For the Indian market, though, that has contributed to a fall in demand for the physical metal.

Gold’s status in India, from its role in weddings to use in rural savings, has helped make the country the biggest buyer of bullion globally, so any slowdown in appetite is a worry for the industry.

“People aren’t buying because they know it’s not giving a return,” Mr Jindal says. “It is the price that decides; people are very price sensitive.”

Lacklustre demand in India marks a fundamental change for the physical gold market. After prices dropped in 2013, hefty buying from India and China saw hundreds of tonnes of metal flow eastward from vaults in London.

However, analysts say this does not mean the world’s two largest consumers of the metal have lost their love for bullion, rather that the way people buy gold there is changing.

In China, gold is becoming an increasingly popular investment product through platforms run by the country’s state-owned banks that allow investments on the Shanghai Gold Exchange via smartphones and online. New financial investment products such as gold exchange traded funds have also started to see inflows.

“You can see that China’s investment demand has the potential to be astonishing,” said Yang Qing, deputy general manager in the global market department of Bank of China, this month at the London Bullion Market Association conference in Singapore. “The proportion of gold in ordinary people’s asset allocation will increase.”