Gold's Price Is Driven by Investors, Not Industrial Demand
Gold hit roughly $3,300 an ounce in 2025, up 38% in a year, moved by central banks and investors, not by jewellers or electronics makers.
Gold’s 2025 price surge, roughly $3,300 an ounce, up about 38% on the year, is a genuinely different kind of price move from anything covered on copper’s or nickel’s economics pages: it was driven overwhelmingly by central bank buying and investor demand, not by a shortfall anywhere in mining, refining, or industrial consumption.
A concentration index that actually confirms “most spread out”
Running the index on gold’s real 2024 shares (China around 11.5%, then Russia, Australia, Canada, the United States, Ghana, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Peru, each in the single digits, with a large “other producers” bucket near 40%) gives an HHI of roughly 2,010, well below cobalt’s or nickel’s. Because that “other” bucket is unusually large here and really represents dozens of smaller individual producing countries rather than one entity, the true HHI, calculated from every country individually, is almost certainly lower still, reinforcing rather than undercutting the dashboard’s own framing of gold mining as the most geographically dispersed production map in this series.
Why demand behaves so differently too
Roughly 52% of current annual demand is store-of-value buying (central banks and bars/coins) rather than jewellery, technology, or any consumable industrial use. This is the real reason gold’s price tracks macroeconomic sentiment, interest rates, currency movements, geopolitical risk, far more closely than it tracks mine output or industrial order books, unlike every other material on this site.
Sources: price and demand figures reference this project’s own published price and demand data (USGS, World Gold Council); HHI is computed directly from that data; the 2,500 HHI threshold is the US Department of Justice/FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines convention.