BREAKING: Significant Drawdown Of U.K. Silver Due To Record Indian Demand
Filed in Precious Metals by SRSrocco
There was a huge development reported in the silver market last week and how did the precious metal community respond? They basically ignored it. Go figure. So, I will try again to get the word out by presenting it in a different fashion.
Indian silver demand was so strong this year, that it produced a significant drawdown of U.K. silver inventories. Matter-a-fact, India had to access silver from China and Russia because available supplies from the U.K. were not sufficient.
According to GFMS Silver Interim Report released on Nov 18th:
Meanwhile demand for silver bars and coins has soared in recent weeks as bargain hunting retail investors returned to the silver market after a disappointing first half of the year. Nowhere is this more evident than in India where imports of silver are up by 14% year-on-year for the January to October period and set for an annual record. With imports in the first ten months totalling a massive 169 Moz many vaults in the UK, traditionally the largest supplier to India, have seen significant drawdowns, leading to more supply flowing from China and Russia.
As you can see from GFMS statement, they even included the word “Massive” to describe the demand coming from India. I emailed Andrew Leyland, GFMS silver analyst and author of the report, to see if he could put some figures behind the declining U.K. silver inventories. He was nice enough to respond today by stating the following:
The LBMA itself doesn’t hold any silver stocks, but its member companies do. These stocks may be unallocated or allocated (often allocated to ETF holdings) and GFMS survey these stock levels once a year ahead of the silver survey in May.
What we’ve heard so far in 2014 has been anecdotal, that there have been large drawdowns in the UK of unallocated material. This has been backed up by trade data that has seen India increasingly buying from China and Russia while the UK (as the traditional lead supplier to India) has lost market share. While we can’t quantify the drawdown or stock level at this point we thought it worth mentioning the trend. In addition, for the silver survey, we’ll be trying to survey how much material from European bullion stocks is allocated. Silver ETFs holdings have been robust, in comparison to gold, and this could effectively limit available inventory to the silver market moving forward…
