HardAssetsInvestor

Mike Norman, anchor, HardAssetsInvestor.com (Norman): Hello everybody, and welcome to HardAssetsInvestor.com. I’m Mike Norman, your host. Today with me my guest is Miguel Perez-Santalla, vice president of marketing for Heraeus Precious Metals Management. Miguel, you’re coming back again.

The last time you were here, last summer, things looked a lot different than they do right now. Metals prices – particularly platinum up around $2,000 – a huge collapse. Give us a little bit of your view now of how things look after this tremendous pullback.

Miguel Perez-Santalla, vice president of marketing, Heraeus Precious Metals Management (Perez-Santalla): Well, platinum's trading around $1,000 … keeps bouncing up trying to go higher. It’s having difficulty mainly because there’s no physical demand; the fundamentals just aren’t there to support it. There’s still platinum being produced, but there’s no consumers. We can see the collapse from the demand especially from the auto sector – which pulled back – and the jewelry sector.

Norman: Right; that’s like auto production at a 40-year low. When you were here last time, you were bearish. You said that the prices were unsustainable at the levels that they were. That proved to be a very prescient call, but now you’re still not seeing any signs of a turnaround in that sector?

Perez-Santalla: That’s correct. At this moment, we’re seeing no growth at all in demand for physical metals. The only industry that’s buying platinum at all is the medical industry – which uses it for stents and other medical devices – and the percentage of platinum or the quantity is minute. So even though that industry continues to grow, it’s not enough to offset the lack of demand from the auto sector.

Norman: Some of the economic indicators now … they are starting to look a little bit more mixed, whereas before they were all aligned very negatively. If you look at the stock market – which is up sharply from its lows from back in March – are you keeping that in the rearview mirror, so to speak, or just keeping one eye on that as maybe some sort of a leading indicator that things might start to perk up in your business?

Perez-Santalla: I’m hoping that things do start to perk up in the physical side. The thing is that even if it perked up in the physical side, it’s not really a direct relationship to the price, because the price is actually being held up right now because of the investment side – the fund money that’s in there, and the investment side, the off-take that goes into the ETFs.

Norman: But hasn’t that pulled back a lot?

Perez-Santalla: It did pull back on the initial collapse, but then there’s been fresh money that’s come into the marketplace. There’s a certain amount of metal still being held off the physical markets, and as long as that money stays there, the prices will be held up, or maybe even go higher on fresh buying from the investment side.