Where silver is used besides bullion, and why it matters

Why industry uses so much silver

Silver conducts electricity and heat better than any other metal, copper included. It reflects light very well too, and its ions are harmful to many bacteria. Few materials manage all of that at once, which is why engineers and doctors keep reaching for it.

Price matters as well. Per gram, silver costs far less than gold, so when a manufacturer needs a precious metal's properties in any real quantity, silver is usually where they land. Industry estimates generally put industrial use at around half of the world's yearly silver demand. For gold, the share is much smaller.

Silver in solar panels

Look closely at a solar panel on an HDB rooftop and you'll see fine silvery lines running across each cell. In most panels those lines are printed with a silver paste. They gather the electricity the cell produces and carry it off, and because silver conducts so well, less power is lost on the way.

One panel holds only a small amount. Multiply that by the number of panels installed worldwide each year, though, and solar becomes one of the largest single uses of silver. Manufacturers keep working to make the lines thinner and use less silver per cell, so demand from solar doesn't simply grow in step with installations.

Electronics, cars and everyday devices

If it has a switch or a circuit board, there's a fair chance it contains some silver. You'll find it in electrical contacts, membrane keyboards, printed circuits and some solders. It carries current reliably and stands up to wear when a contact opens and closes thousands of times.

Cars use more of it as they carry more electronics. Silver also goes into brazing alloys for joining metal parts, into coated glass and mirrors, and into the printed antennas of some RFID tags. The amount in any one item is tiny. Usually it isn't worth recovering, so a good share of industrial silver is effectively used up for good.

• Phones, laptops and TVs: contacts, circuits and solder
• Cars: switches, sensors and control electronics
• Buildings: low-emissivity coated glass and mirrors
• Some RFID tags: printed silver antennas

Medicine, water and hygiene

People were using silver to keep things clean long before anyone knew why it worked. Today it appears in some wound dressings and burn treatments, in coatings on certain medical devices such as catheters, and in some water filters.

You'll also see it in clothing and household goods sold as antibacterial. None of this uses much silver compared with solar or electronics. What it does provide is a quiet, steady layer of demand that has little to do with financial markets.

Photography, jewellery and silverware

For much of the twentieth century, photography was one of silver's biggest customers. Film and photographic paper depend on silver compounds that darken when light hits them. Digital cameras cut that demand hard, although silver-based film is still used in some X-ray work and by film hobbyists.

Jewellery and silverware are still big users. Most silver jewellery is sterling, stamped 925: 92.5% silver, with the rest usually copper to make it harder. That's a different thing from the 999 bullion we sell, and a sterling piece is valued on its silver content, not as bullion. Jewellery demand tends to follow incomes and fashion, and in this part of the world it picks up around weddings and festivals.

Why silver's price behaves differently from gold's

Gold is mostly bought to be kept. It sits in bars, coins and jewellery, and in central bank reserves, and relatively little is consumed. Silver has one foot in that world and the other in the factory. When manufacturing is busy, industrial buyers need more; when it slows, they need less. So silver can react to news about industry and the wider economy in ways gold often doesn't.

Supply adds a twist of its own. Much of the world's silver comes up as a by-product of mining lead, zinc, copper and gold. Mines are rarely opened or shut because of the silver price alone, so output is slow to respond when demand changes.

Then there's size. In money terms the silver market is much smaller than gold's, and a smaller market moves further on the same amount of buying or selling. That's a large part of why silver has historically swung harder than gold, both up and down. Some people watch the gold-to-silver ratio, the number of ounces of silver one ounce of gold would buy, to see how the two are moving against each other. None of this tells you where prices go next. It just explains why the two metals don't move in step.

What this means at the counter

Our silver prices follow the live world spot price through the day, with our premium shown openly on every product page. At weekends, when the world market is closed, we sell at the last closing price. You can see live prices on our site at any time.

Every piece we sell is tested first, with a Precious Metal Verifier and XRF, and PAMP bars get a Veriscan check as well. If you have questions about bar and coin formats, or about how GST treats 999 silver in Singapore, ask us in the shop or on WhatsApp. For the full GST rules, IRAS's e-Tax guide on investment precious metals is the place to go.