Recently, China has gained the lead in various economy ratings replacing gradually the pacesetter U.S. Early this year, the released figures on the total import and export turnover ranked China first in terms of sales volumes in the global trade. Besides, the statistics shows a new record – China has been leading the field as the biggest gold purchaser. Independent precious metals consultancy GFMS Ltd awarded China the title of the largest gold consumer in the world. Experts arrived at such a conclusion after having scrutinized the situation on the world precious metals market. According to their data, Chinese citizens bought 1,189.8 tons of gold last year. As compared to 2012, the gold purchases swelled by a massive 32% in 2013, whereas they increased fivefold against 2003. The most part, to be exact 724 tons, was acquired by jewelry factories and will be used for the mass jewelry production. China has been able to outpace its long-time rival India which bought only 987.2 tons of gold in 2013. Interestingly, gold jewelry is treated as something special in these two countries; it has always been in great demand and considered to be necessities, not luxuries. The Chinese prefer investing money in gold with the lowest percentage of admixtures, for example 24-karat gold. So, 366 tons of such pure gold in the form of 1 kilo ingots were purchased in 2013, that is 47% more than in 2012. The upswing in purchases became possible mainly due to the gold price lowering during 2013 when the precious metal lost 28% of its value. It should be reminded that some renowned analysts made their forecasts concerning the fast growing China’s demand for gold as early as 2012. At that time they were sure China would be able to beat India in terms of the demand for gold.
