Nine months take 27.4% off China's brand gold counters

Brand jewellery gold peaked at 1,722 yuan a gram on 29 January and sits at the 1,250 level now. A Huaxia Times report from Shuibei puts the district's own buy-sell spread near 183 yuan on 4 October.

By The Metals Desk

10 October 2026

What changed

The dealer's spread has not moved with the price. A Shuibei wholesaler puts gold's selling-to-buyback gap near 183 yuan a gram, down from roughly 190 a month earlier. Brand counters sit 27.4% below their January peak.

What it means

If you wholesale gold in China: Watch the spread, not the price. The middle of the chain gave up almost nothing.
If you retail finished jewellery: Counters sit roughly a quarter below January.
What this is not: A current international price, or a verified footfall count.

Key figures

Brand gold against its 29 January peakCC division, 1,250 / 1,722 = 72.6%	27.4%
Shuibei buy-sell spread per gram, 4 Octfrom about 190 a month earlier	183 yuan
Largest single-day move, 27 September1,100 to 1,070 a gram	30 yuan
Gold spot, Kitco bid, final 9 Oct sessionthe tape's mark, carried as filed	$4,193.60

Source: Shuibei figures from a Huaxia Times report dated 7 October 2026 18:25 CST, carried by Eastmoney. The international level is the Carat Capital tape of 10 October 2026, which covers the final 9 October session.

The spread barely narrowed

One eighty-three a gram. A Shuibei stallholder in finished jewellery puts gold's selling-to-buyback gap near 183 yuan a gram. That is 4 October's market.

From about one ninety. He gives roughly 190 yuan for the same period a month earlier. That is 96.3% of the earlier figure, so 3.7% narrower.

Not a margin cut. His own account is that middlemen have not compressed margins and are passively tracking the international board rather than passing anything through.

What moved, what did notShuibei and brand-counter figures as published by Huaxia Times via Eastmoney, 7 October 2026; the spot figure is the Carat Capital tape of 10 October 2026 covering the final 9 October session

Measure	Then	Now	Change
Brand jewellery gold, per gram	1,722 yuan, 29 January 2026	1,250 level	1,250/1,722 = 72.6%, so 27.4% below
Shuibei buy-sell spread, per gram	about 190 yuan, early September	about 183 yuan, 4 October	183/190 = 96.3%, so 3.7% narrower
Gold unit price, 27 September	1,100 yuan a gram	1,070 yuan a gram	about 30 yuan in one session
Shuibei Jinzuo footfall, 3 days	Not published	Estimated over 80,000 visits	One unnamed employee's estimate
Gold spot, international	$4,104 intraday, 6 October, per the report	$4,193.60, final 9 October session	Tape mark, above the cited intraday

Notes on this table

Every comparative is printed with its division so the two can be compared. 1,250 divided by 1,722 is 0.7259, so brand counters are at 72.6% of the January peak and 27.4% below it; the report's own wording is 'nearly 30%' and the difference is the rounding of the current level, which the report gives as a threshold rather than a quote. 183 divided by 190 is 0.9632, so the spread is 96.3% of its early-September width and 3.7% narrower. The 1,100-to-1,070 move is the source's own two figures, not a division. The footfall figure is attributed to an unnamed counter employee at one mall and is not upgraded here. The spot line compares the report's cited 6 October intraday with this paper's own tape mark and is labelled on both sides; it is not a same-moment comparison.

Nine months, a quarter off

Seventeen twenty-two. Brand jewellery gold peaked at 1,722 yuan a gram on 29 January, the report's own historical high. It now sits at the 1,250 level.

Twenty-seven point four. That is 72.6% of the peak, so 27.4% below it. The report describes the same fall as nearly 30%.

Twenty-seven September. The unit price fell from 1,100 to 1,070 yuan a gram in one session, the largest single day of the move. Silver eased about 1 yuan a gram alongside it.

Footfall is the soft figure

Eighty thousand, estimated. A counter employee at Shuibei Jinzuo estimated the mall's traffic topped 80,000 visits over the holiday's first three days. One mall, one unnamed source.

Asking, not buying. The report sets that traffic against a stalled transaction pace, with wholesale stalls locked and buyers querying prices repeatedly.

Growth, but slower. Zhu Zhigang of the Guangdong Gold Association says holiday sales grew by less than last year. He says investment demand has exceeded jewellery demand since 2025.

What to watch

Through November 2026Whether the Shuibei buy-sell spread narrows below 180 yuan a gram. Holding near 183 through a 27.4% drawdown is the finding; a break would be the next one.
Monday 12 October 2026The next scheduled refresh of this paper's retail price lists, last dated 5 October.
Post-holidayZhu Zhigang's own forecast of a sales decline once the holiday peak clears, which is checkable against the next monthly Chinese retail figures.

The story so far

Go deeper

What would change this call

A narrowing spread. The whole argument here is that the middle of the chain held its gap while the price fell a quarter, and a Shuibei buy-sell gap printed materially under 180 yuan would reverse it. It would also read differently if the 183 and 190 figures turn out to describe different products: both come from one stallholder in finished jewellery, and a bullion desk's spread is a different instrument.

Why a buyback spread is the honest margin

A retail gold price tells you what a counter asks. It does not tell you what the counter earns, because the asking price contains the metal, the workmanship, the brand and the shop, and none of those is disclosed separately. A buy-sell spread does tell you something, because it is the same operator quoting both sides of the same material at the same moment: the gap between what it sells gold for and what it pays to take gold back is the clearest published read on what the intermediary keeps. That is why this figure is worth more than the headline price in a falling market. When the metal drops, a retailer can appear to be passing savings on while holding its own gap constant, and only the two-sided quote shows which is happening. Two cautions belong with it. First, a buyback price is not purely a margin: it carries assay, refining and remelt cost, and a buyer of scrap takes real risk on purity, so some of the gap is genuine cost rather than profit. Second, this figure is one stall's, self-reported, for finished jewellery. It is indicative of the Shuibei wholesale layer rather than a market statistic, and no exchange or association publishes a Shuibei spread that could be used to check it.

Method

One Chinese primary plus this paper's own tape and its own prior article. The Eastmoney page carrying the Huaxia Times report was fetched directly this morning (200, 70,428 bytes, saved to newsroom/sources/2026-10-10/desk/shuibei.html) and every printed figure was greped in the raw bytes in the original Chinese before writing: '1722元/克' 1 hit, '1250元关口' 2 hits, '183元/克' 1 hit, '回收价差约183' 1 hit, '190元上下' 1 hit, '约190元的价差' 1 hit, '8万人次' 7 hits, '朱志刚' 3 hits, '1100' 1 hit, '1070' 1 hit, with the page's own dateline reading 2026年10月07日 18:25. ARCHIVE, period rule, both sides named, and a repeat was killed on it: entity search for 'Shuibei' against website/content/articles.json returns 3 hits and all three were opened and read. Ours of 2026-10-05 (a-shuibei-wholesale-gold-reads-one-thousand-sixty-one.html) covers the 3 OCTOBER wholesale level, 1,061 yuan a gram, against brand counters at 1,249, 1,252 and 1,255 on 2 October, with the retail gap at about 190 yuan — THE SAME HEADLINE NUMBERS AND THE SAME HOLIDAY WINDOW as the retail-gap material in today's source, which also gives 1,061 on 4 October and the same roughly 190-yuan retail gap. That framing is therefore a repeat and is not printed again; this article is confined to what our archive does not hold. Exact-digit checks against website/content/articles.json: '1,722' 0 hits, '1722' 0 hits, '183 yuan' 0 hits — the 29 January peak, the nine-month drawdown and the dealer buy-sell spread have never appeared in this paper. Ours of 2026-09-30 (a-twelve-forty-five-off-the-august-high.html) covers the 25 August to 29 September fall on the same counters and is a different window. DIFFERENT PERIOD AND DIFFERENT INSTRUMENT on the legs printed here: ADVANCED, and what advanced is a holiday-week retail gap previously published to a nine-month drawdown and a dealer's two-sided spread. Under the One-Price Rule the international figure is the tape's own mark and is not re-read: no metals story leads this edition, today is Saturday and the tape itself records, from Kitco's identical originalTime across four metals and CNBC's UNCH flag, that there is no Saturday session to report, so the mark filed at 05:00 ET stands and prints as filed at $4,193.60. newsroom/tape/2026-10-10.json and newsroom/tape/latest.json were compared before publication: gold_spot 4193.6 in both — MATCH. The report's own $4,104 intraday for 6 October and its claim of a $4,697 high on 25 August are the source's and are labelled as the source's; this paper's tape does not carry those marks and neither is adopted here. The three divisions are Carat Capital's and are printed with their arithmetic. No quotation is carried: the stallholder and the analyst are paraphrased with attribution, because a translated quotation cannot be checked word-for-word by a reader of this paper.

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