Silver import falls 22% in March, rises 547% for year in Ahmedabad

Silver capped the financial year 2017-18, which was a highly volatile one, with a 22% decline in the last month of the year, even as import of the shiny metal was up by a staggering 547% for the whole fiscal. Import of silver at Ahmedabad airport for March 2018 was 15.64 tonne, almost 22% lower than import of 20.05 tonne in March last year, GSECL said. For the whole of 2017-18, the import was 234 tonne, which was 5.5 times more than import of 36.19 tonne in the 2016-17 fiscal.

Silver import saw huge swings throughout the year. The import stood at 3.95 tonne in April, and rose ten times to 39.45 tonne in May, before falling to just 0.43 tonne in the month after that. The import rose to 19 tonne in July, fell to 0.43 tonne in August, before rising to nearly 26 tonne for the two months after that, and falling to below one tonne in the subsequent three months. In February, the penultimate month of the fiscal, import of the white metal zoomed to a multi-year high of 102 tonne, which was nearly 45% of the whole year's import.

Jewellers attributed the sharp rise in silver import in February to spike in use of silver in various industries, and only slightly because of higher demand from retail consumers.