Gold dazzled in its familiar bastion this Dhanteras, again. After a tepid festival season last year, consumers thronged jewellery outlets on Tuesday to mark the auspicious occasion and take advantage of relatively lower prices this year. By the evening, many jewellers, especially in Delhi and Mumbai, said their sales may have gone up to 30% from a year before and up to 20% even from last month.
“Today is a good day for us. Foot fall in many of our outlets has been 4-5 times higher than a year before. Last year was exceptionally bad for the industry, but the situation has improved. It’s good to see that more customers are shifting to the organised jewellery sector from the unorganised one,” Ramesh Kalyanaraman, executive director at India?s second-largest jewellery retail chain Kalyan Jewellers, told FE.
“Consumer sentiment is much better today than last year and gold prices are lower by 10% than a year before. So people are scrambling to make purchases,” said Sandeep Kulhalli, vice-president (retail and marketing) at Tanishq, India?s largest jewellery chain.
Jewellers were badly hit by a crunch in raw material supplies in 2013 following the imposition of 10% import duty and RBI?s 80:20 rule, which mandated that at least one-fifth of imported gold must be reserved for re-exports. Consequently, many jewellers in Delhi and Mumbai witnessed up to 40% drop in sales on Dhanteras as well as Diwali last year.
Rajiv Popley, director at Mumbai-headquartered Popley Group, said: “Sales have been quite brisk today. As soon as we opened our outlets at 9 am, people started rushing and footfall has been significantly higher than a normal day. Usually, sales in the evening and night are even higher than the day.” He added: “Sales today will be at least 20% higher even from a month before and certainly much better than this time last year.”
Gold prices in Delhi rose R150 per 10 gm to R27,925 on Tuesday, responding to the uptick in demand, but are still down from a year before when supply curbs drove up premiums, making the metal costlier for domestic buyers.
Suvankar Sen, executive director at Kolta-based Senco Gold, said the sales of his company are expected to have gone up by around 15% and footfall has been encouraging. “Customers have also started making purchases for the upcoming marriage season.”
Sachin Kothari, director at BullionIndia, said his company’s sales rose 20-25% on Dhan-teras day from a month ago.
Online purchases of gold products, too, saw a jump. “We launched a new line of collection in gold and diamond, specially for Dhanteras. Even through half a day, our sales jumped 300%, compared with a month before. We are sure we will close at a record high today,” said Vishwas Shringi, founder of a leading online jewellery store, voylla.com.
World Gold Council has forecast the second half of 2014 to witness higher demand than 380 tonne a year before.
