Silver's breakout drags gold-silver ratio to lowest in over a decade

Electronics and solar demands reshape the precious metals trade

Silver continues to outperform the yellow metal, with the gold-to-silver price ratio declining to its lowest level since 2013. The ratio fell to around 57 on Wednesday in the international market, from a five-year high of 100.8 at the end of April 2025. This marks the highest price of silver relative to gold since March 2013, when the ratio stood at 56.4. The price of silver relative to gold was lowest in March 2020, when the yellow metal was 113x more expensive than its white counterpart.

 

Silver futures were trading at $78.6 per troy ounce (ozt) on Wednesday, while gold was trading at $4,463.6 per ozt. With this, silver prices are up 152 per cent since the end of February 2025, compared with a 56.2 per cent rally in gold over the same period. This is the biggest outperformance of silver over gold on a 12-month basis since April 2011.

 

The current gold-to-silver price ratio is slightly lower than the 50-year median value of 63.4. The ratio, however, has been highly volatile, ranging from a low of 15.9 in December 1979 to a high of 112.7 in April 2020.

 

Over the past 50 years, silver’s price relative to gold was at its highest in December 1979, when silver was priced at just one-sixteenth of the yellow metal. At the time, silver was trading at $32.2 per ounce, compared with $512 per ounce for gold. More recently, the gold-to-silver price ratio shrank to a low of 32.6 in April 2011, when the white metal rallied to $47.91 an ounce against a gold price of $1,563.7 an ounce.

 

The gold-to-silver ratio could fall further as demand for silver from electronics and photovoltaics grows much faster than metal supply, raising fears of a supply crunch.

 

According to the Silver Institute, industrial demand for silver, including electronics and photovoltaics, has grown at a compound annual rate of 5.8 per cent since 2020, compared with just a 1.1 per cent compound annual growth rate in overall silver supply, including newly mined and refined metal and recycling.

 

Annual mine production of silver in 2025, at 835 million ounces (moz), was still 7.2 per cent lower than the 2016 production of 900 moz. Over the same period, industrial demand for silver rose 38 per cent, while demand from photovoltaics jumped 140 per cent.

 

Industrial uses now account for nearly 59 per cent of global silver demand, up from 49.4 per cent in 2016. This has pitted silver investors (or speculators) against electronics and solar panel manufacturers, triggering a sharp rally over the past 12 months.

 

This shift has turned silver into a critical metal rather than a purely precious or monetary one, prompting several governments to hoard or stockpile it. Earlier this week, China — the world’s second-largest producer of the metal — restricted silver exports in a bid to improve availability for its massive electronics and solar photovoltaic industry.

 

By contrast, the rally in gold has been driven largely by investment demand, especially from non-Western central banks diversifying their foreign exchange reserves away from fiat currencies such as the US dollar and the euro.

 

Over the past five years, central banks have cumulatively bought 4,515 tonnes of gold, accounting for about a fifth of total demand during the period. In the preceding five years, the central bank's share was 10.8 per cent.

 

However, in 2025, net purchases by central banks fell 22.5 per cent year-on-year, with gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs) becoming the main driver of demand. Gold ETFs bought 825 tonnes of gold on an annualised basis in 2025, compared with net sales of 6.4 tonnes in 2024, according to data from the World Gold Council.