A follow-up article to the one I published here recently on Switzerland nowadays shipping more gold to mainland China than to Hong Kong has been published on sharpspixley.com.  The original article related to Swiss gold export figures for January showing the highly significant fact that the country shipped 42.1 tonnes of gold to mainland China and only 24.5 tonnes to Hong Kong.  Now Switzerland has released its February gold export statistics showing that again more gold went directly to mainland China than to Hong Kong (26.0 tonnes to 19.4 tonnes)  This works out That 60% of Swiss gold exports in the first two months of the year went directly into mainland China, bypassing Hong Kong altogether.

Go back around three years and nearly all China’s imported gold went to Hong Kong first and then to the Chinese mainland, so Hong Kong gold exports to China were taken by the media and major gold analysts as representative of total Chines gold imports.  This is obviously no longer the case with perhaps more than half Chinese gold imports not touching Hong Kong at all – yet some media still publish the figures as though a sharp year on year fall in Hong Kong gold exports to the mainland indicates a similarly sharp fall in total Chinese gold imports.  As the Swiss figures show this is no longer the case.

To read the Sharps Pixley article click on China taking in more Swiss gold than Hong Kong for second successive month