For many private investors, silver is merely a kind of store of value with little glitz and glamor. But this view is completely wrong. Although silver is clearly an investment to preserve value and is also nice to look at in the form of jewelry, silver nevertheless has a kind of "hybrid function". This means that recently about 50% of the total silver demand came from the industry, while the rest was mainly demanded by professional investors in the form of bars and coins as well as by the jewelry industry. In this context, demand picked up strongly last year. Also from the investor side, but more and more demand is coming from booming high-tech sectors such as electromobility, photovoltaics and 5G technology. Although copper is by far the most widely used metal in electrical engineering, its unbeatable properties in terms of the highest electrical conductivity of all elements and the highest thermal conductivity of all metals clearly make silver one of the metals most in demand in the current decade, although production has long been unable to keep pace and there has de facto been an ever-greater supply deficit on the silver market for several years.
A veritable explosion in demand with growth rates in the double-digit percentage range can be expected in the future, especially from industry, and the first signs of this have already been noticeable for several years. The energy sector in particular will play a dominant role. Especially the use in many new components of more and more electric vehicles, in photovoltaic systems (installed over several decades), but also in 5G networks and in the medical sector, will cause industrial demand to rise sharply in the coming years. This is made possible by its special properties, which cannot be replaced by any other metal.
This naturally opens up excellent opportunities for interested shareholders to participate in the silver market.
