CaratChina's jewellery counter charges 39.5% over the exchange price
The Shanghai Gold Exchange closed Au99.99 at 940.72 yuan a gram on 14 August. Chow Tai Fook's counter reads 1,312. The gap is 371.28 yuan, and it is wider than it was six days ago.
§1Two prices for the same gram.
The Shanghai Gold Exchange closed its Au99.99 contract at 940.72 yuan a gram today, from an opening of 955.00 and a session low of 933.01, on 3,886.14 kilogrammes of volume. The exchange's deferred contract, Au(T+D), closed at 940.44 on 41,646 kilogrammes. Those are the exchange's own published daily quotations rather than an aggregator's copy of them. On the same day Chow Tai Fook listed 24-carat jewellery at 1,312 yuan a gram, a figure carried identically by two independent Chinese price aggregators, jinjia.com.cn and cngold, which is the strongest agreement available on a counter price. Dividing one by the other, this desk's arithmetic, puts the counter 39.47% above the exchange, a gap of 371.28 yuan on every gram sold.
That gap is not closing. This paper published the same pair on 9 August at 938 yuan on the exchange and 1,286 at the counter, a spread of 348 yuan and a markup of 37.10%. Six days later the exchange has moved 2.72 yuan, or 0.29%, and the counter has moved 26 yuan, or 2.02%. The gap did not close; it widened by 23.28 yuan a gram. Two disclosures belong with that sentence. One aggregator's series carries 1,286 against 7 August rather than 8 August, and the same two aggregators disagree about 13 August by 11 yuan, one reading 1,340 and the other 1,329. This desk cannot establish which board hour either page is reading and does not resolve it here. The 14 August figure is the one both of them agree on, which is why the comparison is anchored there.
§2Six sessions, and the gap is wider.
Today's session moved both legs down and moved them at very different speeds. The exchange closed 8.52 yuan lower than its 13 August close of 949.24, a fall of 0.90%. The counter came off 28 yuan from 1,340, a fall of 2.09%, cutting about two and a third times as fast as the metal it is made of. The premium therefore narrowed today, from 41.17% on one aggregator's 13 August counter price or 40.01% on the other's, to 39.47%. The counter moves in steps and the exchange moves in fractions: across the sessions the aggregator series records this month, the Chow Tai Fook price went 1,231, then 1,240, then 1,297, then 1,286, then 1,308, held at 1,308, then 1,336, 1,329, 1,340 and 1,312. Almost every one of those is a round jump of tens of yuan against an exchange that rarely moves one per cent in a day.
The gap did not close; it widened by 23.28 yuan a gram
§3A stepped price against a traded one.
For anyone pricing against China, the useful figure is the band rather than the day. On the readings this desk can verify, the Chinese jewellery markup has run between 37.10% and 41.17% this month, and it is currently near the top half of that range while the metal itself is falling. This paper reported on 3 August that China's gold jewellery consumption fell to its lowest since 2004, and on 9 August that the country's bullion buying was its heaviest month since 2023. A widening retail markup against a shrinking jewellery volume and a rising bar-and-coin volume is the same story told three ways. The limit on all of it should be stated plainly: a listed counter price is an asking price, not a transacted one, and workmanship charges, store discounts and buy-back terms sit outside both numbers here.
The counter is not a gold price, it is a retail price that happens to be quoted in grams, and the last six days are the clearest demonstration of it this paper has had. The exchange has barely moved since 8 August and the shop window has moved eight times as far, in both directions, in round steps that no metal market produced. That is a merchant setting a margin, not a market clearing. The number worth watching is not 1,312 and not 940.72 but the 39.47% between them, because that is the only one of the three that describes a decision somebody made. Watch whether the markup settles below 39% now that the counter has started cutting faster than the exchange. If it does not, the Chinese shopper is paying a wider margin into a falling market, which is the opposite of what a falling market is supposed to do to margins.
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