Gold demand still strong despite hefty supply
Thanh Thuong
By Thanh Thuong - The Saigon Times Daily
HCMC – Contrary to initial forecasts of the State Bank of Vietnam, commercial banks and gold trading firms rushed to snap up 26,000 gold taels put up for auction on Thursday.
There were 17 entities participating in the auction on Thursday, five of them trading firms. The offered price was VND37.45 million per teal, which was quite low compared to the market price at the same time.
Fifteen units won the auction, with five buying around 8,000 taels and banks taking the rest. The lowest bid was VND37.48 million while the highest was VND37.73 million.
According to a bidder, unlike in the previous transactions when buyers were mainly banks and bids were hundreds of thousands dong higher than the floor price, the price gap on Thursday narrowed down as banks did not buy gold at all costs as before.
He said his firm bought 1,000 taels which were used to cover the amount sold in previous days. However, there were entities setting the selling price after offering the bids, and thus they earned profits right after the bidding ended, he added.
Meanwhile, before the gold auction took place, the central bank said commercial banks’ needs to buy gold had dropped, resulting in a decline in gold buying at auctions.
Another gold bidding will take place today with 26,000 taels on offer. As much as 1.143 million gold taels, equivalent to nearly 43 tons of gold, have been sold.
The central bank said it has imported an equivalent gold amount in the past time, which is quite huge since Vietnam stopped importing gold in 2011.
The price of SJC gold at Saigon Jewelry Company (SJC) dropped to VND37.1 million per tael for buying and VND37.7 million for selling, down VND200,000 per tael compared to Thursday morning and up VND100,000 from the day before.
Meanwhile, the global gold price on the European market edged up US$21.9 an ounce on Thursday afternoon to US$1,284.
Small domestic gold price adjustments have led the domestic-global price gap to fall to VND5 million per tael from the previous VND7 million per tael recorded late last week.
On the informal market, the U.S. dollar price has fallen to VND21,550 for buying and US$21,600 for selling. However, most banks still sell the dollar at the cap price of VND21,246.
The State Bank has also announced that it would supply U.S. dollars for any banks in need.
Đăng ký: VietNam News
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