Jewellers want to tread it holding IT hand!

NOW CITY JEWELLERS want IT-savvy hands to handle their trading interests and upmarket business challenges.

NOW CITY JEWELLERS want IT-savvy hands to handle their trading interests and upmarket business challenges.

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Many jewellers even launched a hidden hunt for them in various trading houses. But, a lack of future career option has kept IT hands off the precious metals business. However, market sources feel, the jewellers’ market may soon get a makeover after it starts working as an organised sector. Good news is that it will be the richest market once it attains a market-savvy trading and retailing balance.

More than one third of the 700-odd jewellers who own retail outlets in the city’s sarafa bazaar already have trading terminals installed by stock brokers for making them trade in gold and silver from the convenience of their shops in the country’s commodity exchanges.

The only hitch being faced by the jewellers is in finding IT-savvy manpower as most young graduates with the knowledge of trading in the bourses are working in top-notch broking houses and are unwilling to move out to a large jewellery outlet even while being promised huge salaries by the jewellers to manage their newfound interest in the commodity business.

With gold prices anywhere between Rs 10,000 to Rs 10,500 per 10 grams and a kilogram of silver quoting at Rs 16,000 in most of the country’s retail markets, the estimated daily turnover of the city’s sarafa bazaar only from bidding in the gold and silver futures rose from Rs 50 crore during 2005-06 to Rs 150 crore in the first quarter of the current fiscal, a leading city-based broker told HT Lucknow Live.

He said initially most jewellers kept out of bidding in gold and silver futures as the complexities of the trade wasn’t really understandable to them. “They (jewellers) in fact were criticising the Union Government’s decision for including gold and silver for trading in the commodities exchanges as volatile prices of the precious metals started affecting both their retail and wholesale business”, the broker informed.

During the past seven months, a clutch of city-based brokers convinced the jewellers to hedge their losses by bidding for gold and silver in the commodity exchanges albeit with a fairly clear warning of even incurring huge losses if the global markets crash in future.

However, with retail gold jewellery business generating a paltry daily turnover of Rs 5 crore in the sarafa bazaar from a level of Rs 15 crore during 2004-05 (barring the peak marriage and festive seasons), most jewellers have turned to investing in manpower and infrastructure for trading in gold and silver futures.
And with the failr large investible corpus in the hands of most of the established jewellers in the city, time is not far when many of them would approach the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to be registered as member brokers of the commodity exchanges of the country.