India’s Gold Story (Chapter 2): Kerala and its love for GOLD!!!

On the occasion of Onam, I have put together some fascinating facts about Kerala:

✳️ If Kerala was a country, it would have the highest gold reserve per capita in the world
✳️ Kerala spends 27x more than the national average on purchasing gold every year
✳️ Kerala amounts for almost 20% of India’s private gold reserves which amounts to roughly 20 lakhs crores
✳️ Kerala consumes 60,000 KG of gold every year and it has over 6000 jewellery shops. This is roughly 2gm of gold per capita per year.

While we all know about Southern states love for gold, the relationship Kerala has with it is unmatched. Thanks to its large migrant population, Kerala gets billions of dollars in inward remittance each year. These immigrants love to buy and save in gold as is evident from their household gold reserves.

There is good enough arbitrage between UAE and India prices so that also adds to the attractiveness of brining in gold to India. We have no idea about the unofficial gold that arrives in Kerala so I will leave that to your imagination 🧠

Kerala’s gold loan economy is literally a marvel which is evident from this data alone:
✳️ The state has one gold loan branch per 3sq km as compared to national average of 1 branch for every 40sq km

📊 Here are some of the top banks & NBFCs with their gold loan AUM. Just like the presence of unofficial gold quantity in the state, we also have a large unorganized gold loan market whose size could be similar or higher than the organized market of 1 lakh crore.

You can read chapter 1 here: https://growthbug.com/indias-gold-story-chapter-1-the-market-size-its-yoy-growth-12cb5a03b7e4