Every middle-aged person has to buy gold sooner or later, and everyone who buys gold has to buy the gold of Shuibei sooner or later.
When people reach middle age, it is still reliable to buy gold
Since last year, I have noticed that my friends around me have gradually divided into two categories. One is that they have been buying gold and then it is beautiful, and the other is thinking about whether to buy some gold.
Shenzhen is a city that makes money, and acquaintances don't engage in those vain greetings when they meet, but go straight to the point and start talking about money projects.
But gold is an excellent vehicle for both investing and making money and daily small talk. Everyone suddenly chatted and found that it seems that many people have been paying attention to gold lately.
A friend's little emotion
When people reach middle age, they have been beaten by society, experienced time friction, and generally know what many things are going on, and at this time they have basically seen all kinds of accessories, assets, and gifts.
As a result, middle-aged people invariably found that the thing that can meet all their needs for value preservation, investment, beauty, human affection, luxury consumption and even inheritance at the same time is gold. It was as if at an age there was a voice calling in my heart. It's like:
When you reach middle age, you will inevitably fall in love with drinking tea and making wolfberries.
When I was a child, I didn't have to wear autumn pants in winter, but when you are over 30 years old, you can start preparing waist and knee pads in September.
Your kernel will change versions on its own.
Compared with those shiny little bracelets and small necklaces when they were young, they still have a sense of luxury with strings of gold necklaces. Although gold is expensive, junior high school chemistry tells us:
The physical properties of gold are very malleable
A small piece of gold can be drawn or beaten into large flat sheets. Although gold is expensive, silver will oxidize and turn black, diamonds can be man-made, and crystals are abundant. Only gold, what was it when you bought it, and what it is now. Because junior high school chemistry tells us again:
Gold has a very stable chemistry and has very few natural reserves that cannot be artificial.
So it's not for nothing that our ancestors used gold as a universal currency, after all, the love for golden things is engraved in human genes.
Some people say that gold is expensive. Gold is indeed expensive. But if you think about it another way, for example, 3 years ago, the price of gold was 374.32/g, and at that time, the main model of the iPhone, Iphone 12 ProMAX, the 512G version cost 12000, and you could probably buy 32g of gold. This year, the new Iphone12 Pro Max 512G version can be sold for 3200 in Xianyu, and at the same time, the gold price is now 482/g, which is about 3450 in the past three years, just enough to buy a second-hand Iphone.
So if you had a little spare money and bought stocks, forget it, let's not talk about that.
We can only say that Shanghai gold was one of the few varieties in China that still had positive returns last year, and the rise of Shanghai gold futures last year was the first in the world.
Such a thing will not change, it will not be broken, it will be valuable, and it can even bring you a little income. This is a lifesaver for middle-aged people. These eyes have seen through too many differences in the world, and only the dazzling golden yellow in front of them is the most beautiful and reliable.
If you want to buy gold, then you can't get around the place of Shuibei.
Where is the water shell
Many people may be a little unfamiliar with "water shells". However, there is a saying in the gold jewelry industry: "Chinese jewelry looks at Shenzhen, and Shenzhen jewelry looks at Shuibei".
Shuibei is an administrative district in Shenzhen's Luohu District and home to China's largest gold and jewellery industry cluster.
It may not be intuitive to say so. Then let me put it another way, what is the status of Huaqiangbei in the digital world, and the status of Shuibei in the gold and jewelry industry is even better.
In a CCTV documentary, it was mentioned that the annual operating income of the Shuibei area exceeded 100 billion yuan, accounting for about 50% of the domestic gold jewelry wholesale market share, of which the physical consumption of gold accounted for about 70% of the physical delivery volume of the Shanghai Gold Exchange.
It is currently the largest gold jewelry gathering area with the highest level of development and the most complete industrial chain in the country. Many people may not know what an industrial agglomeration is, that is, you can see all the branches and practitioners of the industry in this place, and the price of gold here is very transparent.
It's not specific enough, is it? What we usually think of as a "place to sell gold" is probably this: (hint: you can swipe left and right):
But in fact, where gold is sold, that's it
such
Moutai elements loom in the rear
And like this:
That's right, it's like buying a mobile phone and buying a USB flash drive, buying gold.
In several buildings in Shuibei, 70% of the country's gold spot trading, processing, sales and other industries are controlled. The B1 floors of several buildings such as Shuibei Jinza, Shuibei Ginza, and Shuibei International are connected, and the middle is all gold retail and wholesale business.
The side-to-shoulder situation in Tuli is just a microcosm of the day-to-day life on the B1 level of the Aqua Shell Constellation.
Fei Fei, a friend of mine in this industry, said that the parking lots of Shuibei and these buildings are particularly difficult to park, and it is difficult to have parking spaces. Many times when I go downstairs after a day of work, I find that there are 3 floors of cars parked outside my car, and I am completely blocked.
When you buy gold in Shuibei, the main thing is that it is cheap. Because there are no middlemen, and the merchants basically only make a fee for manual fees, and one gram is also sold at the wholesale price.
The price given by the merchant is the gold purchase price itself + the manual fee they have to charge. So you can often see things that cost more than 600 per gram at the counter, and when you get here, it's less than 500 per gram, of which 480 is the price of gold itself.
And you will find that the hearts of the merchants of Shuibei are very "big". Usually the gold is placed like this:
Only.. It's casual. And these can be taken out and viewed by the counter.
When you buy gold here, there will be no bells and whistles. From hundreds of pearl necklaces to tens of thousands of goldware, they are all directly taken into bags for you and taken away.
Oh, you bought a pendant, and the boss can take you to a stall he knows next to you and let you string another rope on your own.
Because this is an industrial chain with a clear division of labor, if customers need exquisite packaging, there are merchants who specialize in selling packaging boxes next to it. This is the effect of industrial clusters.
The industry is the industry itself
Feifei sent me a photo:
This is what it looks like when you go up to B1 from the parking lot. He said that it was as if stepping through this door was a new world.
It's noisy but orderly, with young people interested in gold, downstream manufacturers from all over the country, Xiaohongshu and Douyin Internet celebrities purchasing agents, and middle-aged men looking at bracelet Buddhist cards.
But what they have in common is that they all pick and trade on the B1 floor of these three buildings, because the office buildings upstairs are all companies in the gold industry, and they are all engaged in the trading of gold commodities, the kind of bulk transactions that ordinary people can't see.
And the business of the merchants is actually very simple, in fact, it is the price of gold plus a labor fee (ranging from 10 yuan to dozens of yuan) to buy and sell. That's their profit margin.
Therefore, it seems that the gold is of high value and full of wealth. But for merchants, it is no different from ordinary goods. And in this industry, everyone is like that.
I asked Feifei if his business was particularly good at the end of the year, and he said yes, but it was just to earn a living expenses, and now he sells it very cheaply.
"Because I want to clear the goods before the Spring Festival, after all, no one knows what will happen next year"
So there's no need to deify or demonize anything. There are many owners in this store, and many of them let their children come over to help with the experience. Teenage junior high school students already have a look when introducing styles, talking about prices, and weighing.
Of course, there are also new formats in the new era. Nowadays, almost every counter will have a young lady doing a live broadcast on more than one mobile phone, usually introducing some of the store's main styles, and hanging a small yellow car.
In the words of the Internet, is this called finding the right traffic entrance, finding the starting point of the problem, relying on offline resources to help online business, and online traffic to empower offline expansion?
When we were researchers, our macro and precious metals researchers were reluctant to give roadshows to Shuibei's customers. Because they know the market, the supply and demand sides of the industry, and the market sentiment itself better than anyone else.
They can easily point out the logical and statistical errors of fledgling researchers, and the people in the business world are very direct, often asking the researcher in one sentence. The bosses are crawling in the industry, relying on themselves to eat the industry thoroughly.
There is never a shortcut to a real profession, it is all by one's own real beating.
P.S.: This article does not contain any investment-related advice