Gold Demand in India to Increase in 2014: WGC

Kolkata: The World Gold Council is confident that 2014 would end on a robust note in gold demand in India, contrary to the initial drop in the first half.

"This year's first-half has been a little challenging. The jewellery demand in terms of volume from January to June (first six months of 2014) as compared to the same period last year is lowered by 14 per cent. But this is a short-term trend," World Gold Council Director-Jewellery for India Vipin Sharma told PTI in an exclusive interview.

"In the long run, we see that the fundamentals are very strong. Now that the festive season is starting and the wedding season setting in, we are looking at a demand figure in the region of 850 tonnes to 950 tonnes."

"We see a very solid and robust trend as far as long-term demand and that of the year-as-a-whole is concerned. We are quite positive in terms of what to anticipate for the last quarter particularly," Mr Sharma said.

He said that the wedding season in India constituted one of the biggest segments as 50 per cent of the total gold consumption occurred during that period.

According to Mr Sharma, who is responsible for the strategic development of the World Gold Council's Jewellery division in India, short-term fluctuations were a common trend and depend on the economic reasons as well as on the sentiments of the consumers.

"Short-term fall is not new. It goes with the demand which sometimes shoots up, sometimes goes down. Last year in the April-May period we saw an unprecedented spurt in gold demand because of certain drop in prices. So we continue to see short term trends specific to economic reasons, sometimes to sentiments at consumer-level and how their anticipation how they foresee the prices," he said.

Talking about the Indian gold market's future, the World Gold Council official sounded quite hopeful going by the trend in the last five years.

"India's love for gold is well known and commodities that historically associated with every celebrations in the country. We continue to see a very robust long term trend in India."

"And in the last five years the total demand at an average it has been more than 800 tonnes per year which is large and significant quantity. So long term trends continues to be very healthy and robust," Mr Sharma added.