Silver Institute News
By GCRU Gold News on Wednesday, November 11 2015, 22:28 - Permalink
Because of strong demand from retail investors, the U.S. Mint, the Royal Canadian Mint, Australia’s Perth Mint, the Austrian Mint and the British Royal Mint recently put their silver bullion coins on allocation, where the volume of distribution of coins is controlled due to bottlenecks in the manufacturing process, according to officials from these mints.
While mints have enough production capacity to meet demand, they are unable to acquire enough ‘planchets’ or coin blanks. Allocation or rationing is employed to prevent periods of suspensions. As a result, lead times for silver coins have been stretched from immediate delivery to three or four weeks in some cases.
In the U.S. in early October, sales of the one-ounce American Eagle Silver Bullion Coins reached 36,753,500 and appeared on track to hit an annual record. At the same time last year, sales hit 33,901,000 with year-end sales of 44,006,000.
Although individual mints, especially the U.S. Mint, have gone to allocations in past years, most recently when American Eagle Silver Bullion Coins sold out in July of this year, restriction from multiple mints at the same time is unprecedented and illustrates considerable tightness in the current global silver coin business.