Sunlight will start selling gold bars in stores – RBC

The Krastsvetmet refinery in Krasnoyarsk, one of the largest producers of precious metals in the world, will be responsible for the production of ingots.

The jewelry retailer will offer 999 fine gold bars weighing up to 50 grams online and offline. At the end of 2024 they will appear in stores in Moscow, and starting in 2025 in other regions of the country. The bars will be sold at competitive prices using an agency sales model. According to a representative of Krastsvetmet, the plant is capable of producing about 70 thousand stamped gold bars per year.

The agency sales model presupposes the absence of independent production of gold bars and their sale on behalf of the manufacturer, which in this case is a refinery. The company produces the bars and manages the documentation, while Sunlight acts as a middleman and receives a commission on sales.

Sunlight also plans to launch a program to buy back investment bars that were sold at the chain’s stores. The company will be able to buy back even damaged gold at a price close to the market price, since “it works with this metal like a jewelry company and will be able to use it later, unlike banks, for which any scratch on an investment is a barrier. It is essential,” Kolerov said.

Permission for legal entities and individual entrepreneurs to sell bullion as refinery agents is valid in Russia from September 2024 to September 2030. To do this, a company or individual entrepreneur must engage in “retail trade of watches and jewelry” according to the OKVED classifier, notes RBC.

According to Gazprombank Investments, in the third quarter of 2024 the total investment demand for gold bars, coins and ETFs increased by 132% compared to the second quarter of 2023 and amounted to 364 tons.

The price of refined gold set by the Central Bank of the Russian Federation on December 17 is 8,798 thousand rubles per gram. Since February of last year, the price of gold has almost doubled.