with India and China together accounting for more than half of the
total. The quiet accumulation inside the world's two most important
physical-gold markets underpinned the bull run as visibly as any central
bank did.¹
bar-and-coin category in boom mode. Full-year volume reached 1,374.1
tonnes, up 16 percent year-on-year, and the dollar value — US$154
billion — marked the highest annual total since 2013.¹ The fourth
quarter alone absorbed 420.5 tonnes of bar-and-coin buying, the
strongest Q4 for the category in a dozen years.
physical-gold buyers, in other words, took more metal off the market
than the monetary authorities did — a ratio that rarely holds during a
central-bank accumulation cycle and that tells you something important
about household behaviour during 2025.
cycles, and neither calendar softened in 2025 despite the price move.
aggressively toward bars and coins — and increasingly toward digital
gold products — as the price made larger ornamental jewellery pieces
less affordable.
a combination of 18-karat ornamental pieces and pure bullion. Gold-coin
sales through Indian post offices, cooperative banks and online bullion
platforms rose sharply in the second half of 2025. By year-end, Indian
bar-and-coin volume alone was estimated to represent a material share of
the global total, with festival seasons delivering outsized monthly
peaks.
has made fractional gold ownership — often in increments as small as
purchases compound into meaningful aggregate flows and have broadened
the buyer base to demographic segments that previously had neither
access to nor interest in physical gold. The infrastructure that enabled
the 2025 boom will outlast the specific price environment.
broader macroeconomic concerns, Chinese households redirected gold
purchasing from jewellery to investment-grade bars. The country's
specialist bullion retailers, including banks authorised by the People's
year.
reported softer traffic, while bullion-dedicated channels in the same
cities saw demand that outstripped inventory in several months. The
underlying logic was consistent with the government's own stance: gold
as a store of value is politically acceptable, and investment demand
therefore has room to run.
state-owned banks offered gold-savings products tied to spot prices,
standardised bullion bars for direct purchase, and storage services that
reduced the friction of physical ownership for urban households. These
channels scaled quickly in 2025 and captured a disproportionate share of
incremental retail flow.
constructive. North American demand stayed at elevated levels, supported
by gold coin sales through the US Mint and various private mints.
up in the second half of the year as eurozone inflation expectations and
currency concerns drove retail allocation decisions.
growth — regions where retail investors have long used physical gold as
a hedge against currency volatility and where 2025's geopolitical risk
environment reinforced that habit. Combined, these markets did not match
India-China scale but they added meaningfully to the global total.
purchases, historically small, picked up noticeably as the domestic
currency weakened and local financial markets absorbed successive
policy-rate shifts. The channel is nowhere near the scale of Asian
retail markets, but it is no longer negligible.
The 2025 bar-and-coin boom reshaped physical-gold logistics.
for institutional clients reallocated capacity toward investment-grade
small bars — typically 10-gram, 100-gram and one-kilogramme products —
to meet retail demand.
months, particularly during the second half of the year when
bar-and-coin buyers were competing for the same throughput. Some
fabricators brought forward their own inventory positioning to avoid
supply-chain delays around the festival season.
are a direct read on how much retail demand there was — and they tracked
the bar-and-coin flow almost perfectly.