Gold jewellery’s share of total gold consumption has fallen back toward levels last seen during the pandemic, Matthew Piggott, director of gold and silver at Metals Focus, told the CIBJO Precious Metals Commission on 6 September 2026. He said 9-carat jewellery has become more widely available in India, where fabricators have moved to lower-purity product, and attributed the fall in jewellery offtake to bullion prices. Platinum has held its share of jewellery demand better, partly through substitution for white gold. The session, at the CIBJO Congress in Vicenza, was chaired by Precious Metals Commission President Vaishali Banerjee.
A carat grade is a statement of fineness: 9 carat is 375 parts per thousand. In India that figure decides which regime the metal moves under. The Bureau of Indian Standards applies its mandatory hallmarking order to gold jewellery and artefacts, which are assayed against the grades of IS 1417 and marked with the BIS standard mark, the purity in carat and fineness, and a six-digit Hallmark Unique Identification number; the obligation sits with whoever makes the first point of sale in the chain from manufacturer to retailer. Gold bullion in bar, plate, sheet, foil, rod, wire, strip, tube or coin form is a listed exemption from that order, and bullion or coin of 999 or 995 fineness is marked instead by BIS-licensed refineries and mints. The separation holds at the border. Jewellery already hallmarked in the exporting country must be re-hallmarked by a BIS-recognised assaying and hallmarking centre before a registered jeweller can sell it — the trade barrier Guido Grohmann of the German association BVSU put to the same session, in the form the rules give it. Bullion crossing the same border stays outside that system; what identifies it is the refiner mark, the assay and the serial.
Piggott’s account reached the commission as a consultancy reading of demand, and the series behind it sits with Metals Focus. The grades admitted to hallmarking, and the fineness attaching to each, are set by BIS in IS 1417.