National Spot Exchange, India’s biggest bourse for trading physical gold, has launched contracts in small denominations, aimed at households in the world’s largest consumer of the precious metal.
The exchange offered contracts in sizes from 8 gm to 1 kg starting yesterday, Anjani Sinha, managing director, said. Presently, the bourse only trades imported gold bars in sizes of 100 gm and 1 kg, he said.
The Multi-Commodity Exchange of India Ltd and the National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange Ltd, India’s biggest commodity bourses, only trades gold futures. That forces individuals to buy or sell bullion through jewellers and banks in the physical form. Households in India, where women are the biggest users of gold, have 25,000 tonnes locked away in family vaults, according to the National Spot Exchange.
“Our main aim is to tap the huge household stock,” said Sinha. “There’s no transparent, electronic market with a nationwide reach for spot gold in India,” he added.
India imports about 800 tonnes of gold a year, about a quarter of the world’s production, and more than three-quarters of which are used in jewellery. Still, the absence of a national spot market means jewellers and traders set the benchmark rate using London’s morning/afternoon “fixing”, the price used by some global mining companies to sell their output.
Small-sized gold contracts may not help India become a price-setter in the global physical bullion market as the country’s commodity exchanges are dominated by traders, producers and consuming companies, compared with the 13 million individual investors who trade stocks.
“The penetration of the gold market through exchan-ges in India is still meagre compared with stocks and to that extent it’s early days to say how many households are net-savvy to trade gold electronically,” said Si Kannan, associate vice president at Kotak Commodity Services Ltd. “People in the villages may still prefer to sell to a jeweller.”
Gold climbed to more than $940 an ounce in Asia, heading for a third quarterly increase, as the weakening dollar fuelled demand for bullion as a store of value. Immediate- delivery gold dropped 0.3 per cent to $934.97 an ounce.
August-delivery bullion on the Multi Commodity Exchange in Mumbai dropped 0.6 per cent to Rs 14,515 per 10 gm. Gold traded in Indian rupees has gained 13 per cent in the past year as the currency weakened on concerns that foreign investors would withdraw funds from emerging markets.
About 25 kg of gold chan-ged hands on the first day of the new contracts, Sinha said later today.
High domestic prices and increased supply of scrap jewelry has lead to a nine-month slump in Indian imports. Purchases in the first three weeks of June were 8 to 10 tons, compared with 17 to 18 tons in the year-ago period, according to the Bombay Bullion Association Ltd.
Indian consumers recycle about 150 tons to 200 tons of gold annually, Kannan said. Scrap supply in the first quarter of 2009 surpassed the year-earlier quarter because of record domestic prices. “This year, recycled gold would range around 25 percent of gold consumption, which would be about 700 tons,” he said.
Sellers using the National Spot Exchange will take their gold to approved refineries which will turn it into bars of international standard purity, Sinha said.
