Yet Another Big User for Silver

Something a little different today...  We often talk of silver ‘wearing 2 hats’ in that about half is used as a precious metal and about half industrial metal.  Those industrial uses are growing in some exciting new areas like polyethylene, and as of last week, the world’s 2^nd biggest car manufacturer, VW, just considerably increased demand for silver by using it to heat windscreens instead of the traditional (and relatively crude) copper wire solution.  This from VW:

“Perfect visibility with no heating wires –the climate windscreen from Volkswagen"

Neither ice scraper nor de-icing spray provides the perfect solution. Volkswagen is offering a genuine alternative with the climate windscreen. It heats up without the use of any filament wires, thus providing perfect visibility. Any renewed misting or icing up is also prevented.In this wire-free system a wafer-thin electrically conductive layer of silver within the laminated glass provides the required heat by converting electric current. Volkswagen is offering the wire-free heated  for the Golf, Golf Sportsvan, Tiguan, Sharan, Passat and Passat Variant models. In the summer, the thin layer of silver acts as a passive heat shield… it is able to reduce the inside temperature by up to 15 degrees more than conventional glass with green tinting.”

Throw in solar panels, electronics, medical equipment and applications, PE, etc and this relatively tiny silver market has some large and growing users.  At a time of great economic and geopolitical uncertainty fuelling its investment demands, the future appears to bode well for the metal.  And all this at a Gold Silver Ratio of around 70!

Silver jumped much more than gold Friday night and whether this news contributed to that can’t be confirmed.  It did however push that GSR down a full point and the spot price is now up 7% for the year already.