Name - Kunal Rana
Student ID - 4648789
Words - 750.
The supply chain for gold goes through 4 distinct phases to reach the end consumers.
Mining.
Refining.
Manufacturing.
Retailing
Mining –
The gold mines are the suppliers of gold to the world, gold mining is the process of extracting gold ores from the earth’s surface using various techniques such as underground mining, long hole stopping etc. as well as extracting the majority of the mined gold from it’s ores and then further purifying it by smelting and cooling it to create `dore’ bars of up to 92% purity to be transferred to the next phase.
Refining –
From the mines, the dore bars are transferred to refineries worldwide to be refined into pure gold of at least 99.5%purity levels,” In the Miller Process, chlorine gas is bubbled into the molten gold. The impurities within the gold separate from it and form chlorides, which concentrate on the surface of the molten metal. It is then relatively easy to pour off the purified gold, which is about 99.5% pure”(World Gold Council, 2014), additionally they use electrochemical processes to achieve the up to 99.9% extremely pure levels in gold refining.
Manufacturing –
This involves the transformation of the refined gold from a commodity into several different products such as jewelry, mobile phone parts, medical implants etc. since gold is an extremely important and useful commodity with various applications in the modern world, with jewelry as the leading product for which gold is used for.
Retailing –
The gold products such as jewelry is then sold to the end consumers all over the world with India, the leading market for gold globally and china being the fastest growing market for gold jewelry in the world. “India has traditionally been the largest market for gold jewelry in
References: World Gold Council. (2014). Supply Chain. Available: http://www.goldfacts.org/en/supply_chain/refining/. Last accessed 6th Feb 2014.