2 weeks Ago By Krishna Kakani
Customers in China are queuing up to encash their jewellery after the Kinghood Group launched Shanghai’s first-ever “gold recycling ATM”. Called the Smart Gold Store, the machine, located in the Global Harbor mall, transfers money to the user’s bank account after weighing and smelting their gold, all within 30 minutes. When Hu Jinhua, a reporter with China Times, visited the gold ATM on April 17, she found that 52 people had already made a reservation to use the machine.
According to Mining.com, it’s booked up till the upcoming holiday in May, the surge driven by rising gold prices. Aunt Wang, one of the customers, traded a 40-gram gold necklace at a recycling rate of 785 yuan ($108) for cash worth 36,000 yuan ($4,900) in less than half-an-hour.
An Aunt Huang waited for about four hours for her turn to encash jewellery she had held onto for 30 years. "The emergence of smart gold ATMs, from a business perspective, is more of a recycling function,” said Xu Weixin, who heads a member unit of the Shanghai Gold Association. “This also shows that with the rise in gold prices, the amount of gold held by the public has increased significantly, and there is a desire to cash out.
On the other hand, judging from the gold sales situation, the purchasing power of ordinary people has dropped significantly,” Designed by the Shenzhen-based Kinghood Group, the machine has a painstaking two-stage rigmarole for authenticating the gold put in it. The first includes identity verification, smelting and recycling, while the second involves an additional assaying of purity. Kinghood debuted the Smart Gold Store in 2019.
The prototype featured a “gold ATM terminal” with services like purchase, customisation and recycling all built into the machine. The standardised version, rolled out last year, has high-precision technology that’s accurate down to 0.01% in determining weight and purity.
Get Latest News Live on Times Now along with Breaking News and Top Headlines from Viral and around the world..
