All right, well, our next presenting company is A-Mark Precious Metals, which is traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol AMRK. A-Mark has a fully integrated platform that allows the company to be a leader in the precious metal space. And here to tell you more about the company is A-Mark's EVP of Capital Markets and Investor Relations, Steve Reiner. I'll hand it over to you.
Great. Thank you. So as Greg mentioned, A-Mark is a fully integrated retailer of Precious Metals. It's actually a $9.5 billion company. It's 421st in the Fortune 500. So I sometimes joke it's the largest small company that not everybody is familiar with. So to start that, we're gonna start with a little video just to kinda run you through company, and we'll go from there.
Dedicated, innovative, integrated. We are A-Mark, a leading portfolio of brands serving the Precious Metals community since 1965. We are a vertically integrated Fortune 500 company with comprehensive services spanning the entire Precious Metals industry. In today's volatile markets, investors are increasingly drawn to the stability of Precious Metals as a store of value. This includes traditional, mature, event-driven customers, as well as digital-first customers, many of whom are beginning their investment journey. A-Mark is committed to serving the breadth of these customers as our market expands. Our fully integrated end-to-end solution covers the full range of Precious Metals products and services, including wholesale, direct-to-consumer, minting, logistics and storage, and lending, creating the industry's most comprehensive platform. Our foundational capacity is rooted in the A-Mark wholesale business.
Trusted by sovereign mints worldwide and an authorized purchaser for the U.S. Mint, A-Mark's long-standing institutional relationships are in a league of their own. From collectors to metal refiners, from financial institutions to manufacturers, A-Mark sells over two hundred products worldwide. In addition to our wholesale business, we've assembled a broad and growing portfolio of leading Precious Metals consumer brands. Our direct-to-consumer category is led by Goldline and JM Bullion. Since its inception in 2011 , JM Bullion transformed the Precious Metals ownership model by leveraging technology and cutting-edge e-commerce tools to become one of the nation's premier online retailers of Precious Metals. JM Bullion offers physical and physically backed Precious Metals ownership via its mobile app and website. It also enables a two-way market through its robust buyback program.
For investors looking for a more personalized service, Goldline provides exemplary Precious Metals account management for a true concierge experience. A-Mark's portfolio of complementary services supports all of these transactions, resulting in a frictionless customer experience. Serving the transportation, distribution, and storage needs of the entire portfolio is A-Mark Global Logistics. A-Mark Global Logistics provides Precious Metals receiving, storage, and delivery services from its state-of-the-art depositories in Las Vegas and Dallas. AMGL's capabilities include the ability to pick, pack, and ship over 100,000 packages per month, a service that supports both A-Mark's direct-to-consumer brands and wholesale clients. Supporting our minting needs are SilverTowne and Sunshine Mint. Combining old-world craftsmanship with modern trailblazing technology is SilverTowne Mint, a leading ISO-certified manufacturer of custom bullion products. We're also proud to own a stake in Sunshine Mint, an industry leader and North America's largest private mint.
As a result of this highly nimble, diversified minting capacity, A-Mark can shift priorities with unprecedented speed as the market demands. To help our commercial customers meet their liquidity needs, our secured lending unit is Collateral Finance Corporation. With over $300 million in loans to date, CFC integrates seamlessly into the A-Mark portfolio by offering collateralized lending to borrowers across the bullion and numismatic markets. The breadth and effectiveness of our integrated portfolio means that A-Mark excels where the customer is today, while our commitment to technology and exceptional customer service means we're ready for tomorrow. This combination of integration and innovation gives A-Mark an enviable foundation for scale as the Precious Metals market expands. We invite you to learn more about A-Mark, the industry's foremost Precious Metals professionals: proven, experienced, and ready for the future.
Okay, so that hopefully has provided you with a pretty good overview of the company. I'm gonna just walk through our history in a little bit more depth, explain to you how the pieces came together, and really focus on the financial results and talk to you about where we're going. So A-Mark was founded in Southern California in 1965 as a Precious Metals dealer. In the early seventies, the U.S., of course, went off the gold standard and a number of countries, led by South Africa, began to sell Precious Metals, sovereign-made Precious Metals into the market. In the 1986 , 1987 period, the U.S. government, or the U.S. Mint, guided by Congress, also began to produce investable-grade bullion. A-Mark, as a wholesaler founded in sixty-five, developed very strong relationships with these various government entities.
Ultimately, A-Mark is an authorized purchaser of the U.S. Mint, and starting in the mid to late 80s, began to partner with the Mint in terms of selling product into the market. As the market developed, A-Mark grew, of course, with it. A-Mark went public in 2014 when we spun out from our parent company, so you're looking at our history of financial results. Starting in 2015 , let me focus your attention, if I could, on the bottom of the chart on the gross profit margin. So you'll see in 2015 , 2016 , two 2017 , we're making forty to fifty basis points a year of gross profit, focused, again, primarily as a wholesaler of Precious Metals, buying metals from government mints and private mints and selling these metals to dealers.
Starting about 2015, 2016, something else began to happen in the marketplace, and that is eventually the internet came the way of Precious Metals. The early stage online retailers of Precious Metals were founded around 2010, 2011, 2012. A-Mark, as a premier wholesaler, began to expand its business and began to make a series of investments to service these companies. We opened in 2015, A-Mark Global Logistics. That's the fulfillment center in Las Vegas that the video talked about. And as the video mentioned, that facility today, on a particularly busy month, has the ability to pick, pack, and ship over 100,000 packages a month, and ship it out to individuals across North America.
We began to invest in private mints, and today, A-Mark owns either outright or through significant investment, the largest private mints in North America. Of course, we continue to grow our relationship with sovereign mints, whereas today, A-Mark is the largest partner of the U.S. Mint. We take about 35% of the silver produced by the U.S. Mint on average over a given year, and about 25% of the gold bullion that the U.S. Mint produces. As the business grew, starting in 2017 , 2018 , we went into our second business unit, which is direct-to-consumer. We purchased a company called Goldline, which is a phone-based retailer of Precious Metals. We closed that transaction in 2018 , and now we're in the DTC business.
And over this period of time, 2015 to the late 2018, 2019, 2020 period, we also began to make minority investments in highly promising online retailers. So much so that in March of 2021, we purchased the 78% of an online retailer by the name of JM Bullion that we did not own. So today, we own 100% of JM Bullion. JM Bullion is a $1.5 billion-plus online retailer of Precious Metals, and since acquiring JM Bullion, we've made seven or eight other outright acquisitions or significant minority investments in retailers, both here in the U.S., in Canada, in the UK, and most recently in Hong Kong. So we have an integrated facility or portfolio of wholesale businesses and now direct-to-consumer or retail businesses.
And that's complemented by our third reporting business, which is secured lending. So since 2005, we have provided liquidity to both dealers and to individuals that own Precious Metals that wanna be able to borrow against them, essentially unlock enabling individuals to unlock the value of those assets. We also lend against numismatics. Numismatics means collectible currency or coins, coins where the value of the underlying asset is significantly greater than metallic value. And starting about two years ago, we've actually begun to lend against collectible sports cards and we've become an important player in that market. You can see the evolution of the business. Again, I call your attention to the March 2021 acquisition of JM Bullion.
I'll note that our fiscal year is June thirtieth, so the years you're looking at are actual June thirtieth years. So you'll see in 2021, 2022, the significant expansion of A-Mark's gross profit. Run across a top line that's now north of $9 billion, A-Mark has become a company that, in this past fiscal year that we just reported, did over $100 million of EBITDA. We actually did a little bit more than $200 million in the year before, because in addition to growing our business, we're also the direct beneficiary of, of consumer demand and consumer volatility. Generally, our business does well when consumers or investors move into Precious Metals.
And, if I look at JM Bullion as our flagship website, today, we serve north of three million customers, or JM has served north of three million customers in its 12 year history. You'll find that consumers own Precious Metals for a wide range of reasons, but many will come into the market when there's risk associated with the market. And we deal in a world of what's called premium. So for those of you that might be familiar with buying Precious Metals, whether you buy them from a local dealer, or you buy it online, or you buy it through a phone-based retailer, there's the concept of premium means what you pay on top of the commodity price. Each item that we sell has a different associated premium with it that represents kind of a consumer demand for that particular item.
And when the market gets a little bit frothier and demand spikes, the premiums tend to expand. So when premiums expand, demand increases. That's rather good for our business. So today, again, an integrated retailer focused on a wholesale business, where we own the largest mints in the country, and where we are the biggest partner to the leading sovereign mints around the world, the government mints. A retail business, where we own the largest brand in the U.S., the largest brand in Canada. We now own a major retailer in Hong Kong, and a very large retailer in the UK, and a integrated lender, that when you put them together, has created a very profitable model, one that's particularly well-positioned for times of uncertainty. With that, why don't I maybe turn and see if there's any questions?
Yeah.
Fire away.
2021-
I'm gonna give you the microphone just 'cause we got a webcast as well.
Uh, Steve?
Yeah.
2021, 2022, 2023 .
Yeah
... those were nice years.
Mm-hmm.
What's kind of the biggest variable when it comes to your gross profit margins?
So, the way I tend to think about Chris, thank you. The way I tend to think about our customer base is really a mix of two core customers. When I'm gonna get to that second group, I'm gonna kind of drive to the variable that really drives profit margin. On the one hand, we have consumers who, what I'm gonna call our core accumulation customers. They are deep believers in Precious Metals for a wide range of reasons, whether it's financial diversification, whether they are uncomfortable with the system, however defined, and they wanna be outside the traditional system, whatever it might be. They are accumulators of Precious Metals. They buy consistently. They actually tend to buy more when the prices come down because, like any long-term accumulator, they like to buy the asset when it goes on sale.
That's a very significant group of customers. We also have a significant group of customers that responds to events in the marketplace. Let's call it risk on and risk off, and when risk goes on into the marketplace, FOMO kicks in. "I need to have financial protection." So to go to Chris's points, if we just think about, ooh, if we go back to kind of March of 2020 , so just over four years ago, and we just kinda think through the series of events that took place, in no particular order, starting with COVID. We've had COVID. We've had the 2020 presidential election and everything that followed from the election. We've had inflation. We've had Russia, Ukraine. There's been a Reddit silver squeeze. We've had Silicon Valley Bank.
What I'm talking about in each of these items are significant events which cause consumers to basically move into Precious Metals and to move into physical Precious Metals. And keep in mind, please, that we're dealing in our world with a fairly unique product that's manufactured, and there's a manufacturing timeline for this product, but when demand spikes, the demand, it spikes very quickly. When you wake up, and you turn on the news, and you see Silicon Valley Bank is about to go down, and First Republic is going, and the government's moving in there, you want Precious Metals immediately. So the production timeline relative to demand gets out of balance. In other words, demand significantly exceeds production capacity in the short term. That causes premiums to spike. When premiums spike and volumes go up, that's very good for A-Mark.
So when you look at the years such as 2021, 2022, 2023, and you just think about the events of that year, that's really what's been going on. With that said, the market itself has been relatively quiet in terms of events for the last 12 months or so. While there's maybe great uncertainty in the market, and there's certainly tragedy that's been going on around the world, just in terms of how the consumer has responded to them, it's the consumer's been relatively passive. I'm talking about the Precious Metals consumer, to events of the last 12 or so months.
I also wanna draw your attention to the other anomaly of our business, which is, again, the commodity prices, because as I'm sure we're all aware of, commodity prices, led by gold, but gold and silver, have had a fairly significant a period of appreciation over the last six or seven months. So in our world, a couple things happen when prices go up. The first thing, again, is that core accumulation customer... Well, let me make two points. The first point is, A-Mark as a business is fully hedged at all times. So if we wake up and prices are up or prices are down, it makes no direct financial impact upon us as a business. What it does impact is how the consumer responds to the market, 'cause that ultimately, again, we're a consumer, you know, we're dealing with a consumer-facing business.
In the short term, when prices go up, two things tend to happen. One is the consumer tends to pause because that accumulation customer sits there and says: "Yes, I believe in Precious Metals, but because I'm a long-term buyer, I'm also a sophisticated buyer, like a portfolio manager, and I'm gonna wait on what I think is gonna be a dip, and I'll wait till the metal goes on sale." That's the first thing that happens. If there's an event that's causing commodity prices to spike, that's a whole different scenario, right? When prices spike in scenario, you know, it's like needing to buy bottled water when there's a hurricane coming into your town. You pay what you pay. But I'm just talking about in kind of a traditional, relatively calm macro environment where commodity prices are moving up.
The second thing that happens when commodity prices go up, and we've seen a lot of it this past year, is people will sell assets back into the marketplace. So A-Mark, through our retail brands led by JM Bullion, makes a two-way market. We're actually really, as a company, the terminal buyer for a lot of Precious Metals. So you can go on JM Bullion today and sell Precious Metals that you have. And what we saw early this year when gold began to go to $2,200, $2,300, is significant sale back activity. To give you a sense of relative scale, on a typical week, we may buy back 3%, 4%, 5% of what we sell, right? So if we're selling $20 of new product, we're buying back $1, just on a relative scale.
Early this year, when prices began to move significantly, that share of buyback grew by a significant multiple, probably north of 30% for many weeks that we're buying back into the marketplace. What happened was, and keep in mind that when you're talking about Precious Metals produced by a government mint, a sovereign product, it's dated, so you know what you're buying back. We ended up buying back a lot of product that was produced in the 1970s and early 1980s.
So essentially, what we ended up buying back was multigenerational product that had been passed down within families, where folks woke up one day and said, "You know, that gold that my grandparents gave me that's sitting in a shoebox someplace, or maybe sitting in a safe deposit box, that was worth $1,200 not that long ago, is now worth $2,400 . I'm gonna sell it back." A lot of that product came into the marketplace. And while that ultimately is a good thing, and we make it to a market, in the very short-term period, it actually dislocates or displaces some new material. So, those factors together, rising prices causing our core consumer and accumulation customer to pause, and product coming back into the market actually serves as a little bit of wind on the nose.
So early this year, we saw a fair bit of that, and we've talked a decent amount about that publicly. With that said, as prices continue to move, gold today around $2,500 an ounce, silver back and forth around $30 an ounce. Gold certainly at record levels, silver near record levels, absent kind of the silver run of the early 1970s. We've seen less buyback business, so which tells us that a lot of that Precious Metals, which have been sitting kind of in family... You know, sitting on the shelf in multigenerational family collections, has come back into the market and has already been digested to the market. So that's a good thing for us.
Anyone else have a question? We got time. Yes, sir.
When people are bringing things back into the market, how do you... And you're buying physical, how do you go out and buy physical and assay it and know what you're buying? In other words, an ounce of gold is an ounce of gold. You know what I'm saying?
Again, given the volume of business that we do-
Right
... and we have two main distribution centers, Las Vegas and Dallas. We have a system, a series of technology that lets us basically test. So if you were to send us back a hundred gold coins, we will get a hundred gold coins. The box will. Let me just walk you through the process. First of all, the box will get opened under camera. So we will physically go through the box and one by one, in front of the camera, count out a hundred coins. So there's never a dispute between you and us about what we've received in terms of quantity. So that's first. Then we will go through and test and make sure that what you've sent us is accurate.
You know, we live in a world where occasionally, either intentionally or unintentionally, just like with currency, there are some bad currency out there. We have to make sure that everything we receive is authentic, so we test it one by one. Very careful. So
Do you give them a price? And I say, "I'm gonna send you a 100 gold ," and you say you'll pay me $2,500 subject to... In other words, will you establish the price today, and then you maybe two weeks from now when you ascertain that those are legitimate?
Yes.
So in other words, I can get a price today-
Yes
... subject to-
Yes
-receipt. Okay.
Yeah, so what we do basically is we give you a price relative to the market benchmark.
Right.
So the benchmark, if it takes you two weeks to put your package together and send it to us by USPS, let's say, right? Obviously, the commodity price can change, so what we're basically in agreement with you is we will pay you $1 over, $3 over, wherever we set the price with you, and you know that basically that's what you're getting based upon the underlying commodity price. And A-Mark, as a trader, you can just go to the website and see what we're using as a benchmark price, but that's the spot price that sits in the market. So it's spot plus.
Does anyone else have any other questions? I know we're just about at time here.
Chris?
One more quick one.
Yeah. After gold and silver, what's the most valuable-
... All right, well, our next presenting company is A-Mark Precious Metals. More about the company is A-Mark's EVP of Capital Markets and Investor Relations, Steve Reiner. I'll hand it over to you.
Great. Thank you. So as Greg mentioned, A-Mark is a fully integrated retailer of Precious Metals. It's actually a $9.5 billion company. It's 421st in the Fortune 500. So I sometimes joke it's the largest small company that not everybody is familiar with. So to start that, we're gonna start with a little video just to kinda run you through company, and we'll go from there.
Dedicated, innovative, integrated. We are A-Mark, a leading portfolio of brands serving the Precious Metals community since 1965. We are a vertically integrated Fortune 500 company with comprehensive services spanning the entire Precious Metals industry. In today's volatile markets, investors are increasingly drawn to the stability of Precious Metals as a store of value. This includes traditional, mature, event-driven customers, as well as digital-first customers, many of whom are beginning their investment journey. A-Mark is committed to serving the breadth of these customers as our market expands. Our fully integrated end-to-end solution covers the full range of Precious Metals products and services, including wholesale, direct-to-consumer, minting, logistics and storage, and lending, creating the industry's most comprehensive platform. Our foundational capacity is rooted in the A-Mark wholesale business.
Trusted by sovereign mints worldwide and an authorized purchaser for the U.S. Mint, A-Mark's long-standing institutional relationships are in a league of their own. From collectors to metal refiners, from financial institutions to manufacturers, A-Mark sells over 200 products worldwide. In addition to our wholesale business, we've assembled a broad and growing portfolio of leading Precious Metals consumer brands. Our direct-to-consumer category is led by Goldline and JM Bullion. Since its inception in 2011, JM Bullion transformed the Precious Metals ownership model by leveraging technology and cutting-edge e-commerce tools to become one of the nation's premier online retailers of Precious Metals. JM Bullion offers physical and physically backed Precious Metals ownership via its mobile app and website. It also enables a two-way market through its robust buyback program.
For investors looking for a more personalized service, Goldline provides exemplary Precious Metals account management for a true concierge experience. A-Mark's portfolio of complementary services supports all of these transactions, resulting in a frictionless customer experience. Serving the transportation, distribution, and storage needs of the entire portfolio is A-Mark Global Logistics. A-Mark Global Logistics provides Precious Metals receiving, storage, and delivery services from its state-of-the-art depositories in Las Vegas and Dallas. AMGL's capabilities include the ability to pick, pack, and ship over 100,000 packages per month, a service that supports both A-Mark's direct-to-consumer brands and wholesale clients. Supporting our minting needs are SilverTowne and Sunshine Mint. Combining old-world craftsmanship with modern, trailblazing technology is SilverTowne Mint, a leading ISO-certified manufacturer of custom bullion products. We're also proud to own a stake in Sunshine Mint, an industry leader and North America's largest private mint.
As a result of this highly nimble, diversified minting capacity, A-Mark can shift priorities with unprecedented speed as the market demands. To help our commercial customers meet their liquidity needs, our secured lending unit is Collateral Finance Corporation. With over $300 million in loans to date, CFC integrates seamlessly into the A-Mark portfolio by offering collateralized lending to borrowers across the bullion and numismatic markets. The breadth and effectiveness of our integrated portfolio means that A-Mark excels where the customer is today, while our commitment to technology and exceptional customer service means we're ready for tomorrow. This combination of integration and innovation gives A-Mark an enviable foundation for scale as the Precious Metals market expands. We invite you to learn more about A-Mark, the industry's foremost Precious Metals professionals. Proven, experienced, and ready for the future.
Okay, so that hopefully has provided you with a pretty good overview of the company. I'm gonna just walk through our history in a little bit more depth, explain to you how the pieces came together, and really focus on the financial results and talk to you about where we're going. A-Mark was founded in Southern California in 1965 as a Precious Metals dealer. In the early seventies, the U.S., of course, went off the gold standard, and a number of countries, led by South Africa, began to sell Precious Metals, sovereign-made Precious Metals into the market. In the 1986 , 1987 period, the U.S. government or the U.S. Mint, guided by Congress, also began to produce investable-grade bullion. A-Mark, as a wholesaler founded in sixty-five, developed very strong relationships with these various government entities.
Ultimately, A-Mark, as an authorized purchaser of the U.S. Mint, starting in the mid to late eighties, began to partner with the Mint in terms of selling product into the market. As the market developed, A-Mark grew, of course, with it. A-Mark went public in 2014 when we spun out from our parent company, so you're looking at our history of financial results. Starting in 2015 , let me focus your attention, if I could, on the bottom of the chart on the gross profit margin. You'll see in 2015 , 2016 , 2017 , we're making forty to fifty basis points a year of gross profit, focused again, primarily as a wholesaler of Precious Metals, buying metals from government mints and private mints and selling these metals to dealers.
Starting about 2015 , 2016 , something else began to happen in the marketplace, and that is eventually the Internet came the way of Precious Metals. The early stage online retailers of Precious Metals were founded around 2010 , 2011 , 2012 . A-Mark, as a premier wholesaler, began to expand its business and began to make a series of investments to service these companies, so we opened in 2015 , A-Mark Global Logistics. That's the fulfillment center in Las Vegas that the video talked about. As the video mentioned, that facility today, on a particularly busy month, has the ability to pick, pack, and ship over 100,000 packages a month and ship it out to individuals across North America.
We began to invest in private mints, and today, A-Mark owns, either outright or through significant investment, the largest private mints in North America. And of course, we continue to grow our relationship with sovereign mints, whereas today, A-Mark is the largest partner of the U.S. Mint. We take about 35% of the silver produced by the U.S. Mint on average over a given year, and about 25% of the gold bullion that the U.S. Mint produces. As the business grew, starting in 2017, 2018, we went into our second business unit, which is direct-to-consumer. We purchased a company called Goldline, which is a phone-based retailer of Precious Metals. We closed that transaction in 2018, and now we're in the DTC business.
Over this period of time, 2015 to the late 2018 , 2019, 2020 period, we also began to make minority investments in highly promising online retailers. So much so that in March of 2021 , we purchased the 78% of an online retailer by the name of JM Bullion that we did not own. So today, we own 100% of JM Bullion. JM Bullion is a $1.5 billion-plus online retailer of Precious Metals, and since acquiring JM Bullion, we've made seven or eight other outright acquisitions or significant minority investments in retailers, both here in the U.S., in Canada, in the UK, and most recently in Hong Kong. So we have an integrated facility or portfolio of wholesale businesses and now direct-to-consumer or retail businesses.
That's complemented by our third reporting business, which is secured lending. Since 2005, we have provided liquidity to both dealers and to individuals that own Precious Metals that wanna be able to borrow against them, essentially enabling individuals to unlock the value of those assets. We also lend against numismatics. Numismatics means collectible currency or coins, coins where the value of the underlying asset is significantly greater than metallic value. Starting about two years ago, we've actually begun to lend against collectible sports cards, and we've become an important player in that market. You can see the evolution of the business. Again, I call your attention to the March 2021 acquisition of JM Bullion.
I'll note that our fiscal year is June thirtieth, so the years you're looking at are actual June thirtieth years. So you'll see in 2021, 2022, the significant expansion of A-Mark's gross profit. Run across a top line that's now north of $9 billion, A-Mark has become a company that, in this past fiscal year that we just reported, did over $100 million of EBITDA. We actually did a little bit more than $200 million in the year before, because in addition to growing our business, we're also the direct beneficiary of, of consumer demand and consumer volatility. Generally, our business does well when consumers or investors move into Precious Metals.
And if I look at JM Bullion as our flagship website, today, we serve north of three million customers, or JM has served north of three million customers in its 12 year history. You'll find that consumers own Precious Metals for a wide range of reasons, but many will come into the market when there's risk associated with the market. And we deal in a world of what's called premium. So for those of you that might be familiar with buying Precious Metals, whether you buy them from a local dealer, or you buy it online, or you buy it through a phone-based retailer, there's the concept of premium means what you pay on top of the commodity price. Each item that we sell has a different associated premium with it that represents kind of a consumer demand for that particular item.
And when the market gets a little bit frothier and demand spikes, the premiums tend to expand. So when premiums expand, demand increases. That's rather good for our business. So today, again, an integrated retailer focused on a wholesale business, where we own the largest mints in the country, and where we are the biggest partner to the leading sovereign mints around the world, the government mints. A retail business, where we own the largest brand in the U.S., the largest brand in Canada. We now own a major retailer in Hong Kong, and a very large retailer in the UK, and an integrated lender, that when you put them together, has created a very profitable model, one that's particularly well-positioned for times of uncertainty. With that, why don't I maybe turn and see if there's any questions?
Yeah.
Fire away.
2021-
I'm gonna give you the microphone just 'cause we got a webcast as well.
Uh, Steve?
Yeah.
2021, 2022, 2023 -
Yeah
... those were nice years.
Mm-hmm.
What's kind of the biggest variable when it comes to your gross profit margins?
The way I tend to think about... Chris, thank you. The way I tend to think about our customer base is really a mix of two core customers, and when I'm gonna get to that second group, I'm gonna kinda drive to the variable that really drives profit margin. On the one hand, we have consumers who, what I'm gonna call our core accumulation customers. They are deep believers in Precious Metals for a wide range of reasons, whether it's financial diversification, whether they are uncomfortable with the system, however defined, and they wanna be outside the traditional system. Whatever it might be, they are accumulators of Precious Metals. They buy consistently. They actually tend to buy more when the prices come down because like any long-term accumulator, they like to buy the asset when it goes on sale.
That's a very significant group of customers. We also have a significant group of customers that responds to events in the marketplace. Let's call it risk on and risk off, and when risk goes on into the marketplace, FOMO kicks in. "I need to have financial protection." So to go to Chris's point, if we just think about, ooh, if we go back to kinda March of 2020, so just over four years ago, and we just kinda think through the series of events that took place, in no particular order, starting with COVID. We've had COVID. We've had the 2020 presidential election and everything that followed from the election. We've had inflation. We've had Russia, Ukraine. There's been a Reddit silver squeeze. We've had Silicon Valley Bank.
What I'm talking about in each of these items are significant events which cause consumers to basically move into Precious Metals and to move into physical Precious Metals. And keep in mind, please, that we're dealing in our world with a fairly unique product that's manufactured, and there's a manufacturing timeline for this product, but when demand spikes, the demand, it spikes very quickly. When you wake up, and you turn on the news, and you see Silicon Valley Bank is about to go down and First Republic is going, and the government's moving in there, you want Precious Metals immediately. So the production timeline relative to demand gets out of balance. In other words, demand significantly exceeds production capacity in the short term. That causes premiums to spike. When premiums spike and volumes go up, that's very good for A-Mark.
So when you look at years such as 2021, 2022, 2023, and you just think about the events of that year, that's really what's been going on. With that said, the market itself has been relatively quiet in terms of events for the last 12 months or so. While there's maybe great uncertainty in the market, and there's certainly tragedy that's been going on around the world, just in terms of how the consumer has responded to them, it's the consumer's been relatively passive, I'm talking about the Precious Metals consumer, to events of the last 12 or so months.
I also want to draw your attention to the other anomaly of our business, which is, again, the commodity prices, because as I'm sure we're all aware of, commodity prices, led by gold, but gold and silver, have had a fairly significant a period of appreciation over the last six or seven months. So in our world, a couple of things happen when prices go up. The first thing, again, is that core accumulation customer. Well, let me make two points. The first point is, A-Mark as a business is fully hedged at all times. So if we wake up and prices are up or prices are down, it makes no direct financial impact upon us as a business. What it does impact is how the consumer responds to the market, 'cause that ultimately, again, we're a consumer, you know, we're dealing with a consumer-facing business.
In the short term, when prices go up, two things tend to happen. One is the consumer tends to pause, because that accumulation customer sits there and says, "Yes, I believe in Precious Metals, but because I'm a long-term buyer, I'm also a sophisticated buyer, like a, like a portfolio manager, and I'm gonna wait on what I think is gonna be, a dip, and I'll wait till the metal goes on sale." That's the first thing that happens. If there's an event that's causing commodity prices to spike, that's a whole different scenario, right? When prices spike in that scenario, it's like, you know, it's like needing to buy bottled water when there's a hurricane coming into your town. You pay what you pay. But I'm just talking about in kind of a traditional, relatively calm macro environment where commodity prices are moving up.
The second thing that happens when commodity prices go up, and we've seen a lot of it this past year, is people will sell assets back into the marketplace. So A-Mark, through our retail brands, led by JM Bullion, makes a two-way market. We're actually really, as a company, the terminal buyer for a lot of Precious Metals. So you can go on JM Bullion today and sell Precious Metals that you have. And what we saw early this year, when gold began to go to $2,200, $2,300, is significant sale back activity. To give you a sense of relative scale, on a typical week, we may buy back 3%, 4%, 5% of what we sell. Right? So if we're selling $20 of new product, we're buying back $1, just on a relative scale.
Early this year, when prices began to move significantly, that share of buyback grew by a significant multiple, probably north of 30% for many weeks that we're buying back into the marketplace, and what happened was, and keep in mind that when you're talking about Precious Metals produced by a government mint, sovereign product, it's dated, so you know what you're buying back. We ended up buying back a lot of product that was produced in the 1970s and early 1980s.
So essentially, what we ended up buying back was multigenerational product that had been passed down within families, where folks woke up one day and said, "You know, that gold that my grandparents gave me, that's sitting in a shoebox someplace, or maybe sitting in a safe deposit box, that was worth $1,200 not that long ago, is now worth $2,400 . I'm gonna sell it back." A lot of that product came into the marketplace. And while that ultimately is a good thing, and we make it to a market, in the very short-term period, it actually dislocates or displaces some new material. So, those factors together, rising prices causing our core consumer and accumulation customer to pause, and product coming back into the market actually serves as a little bit of wind on the nose.
So early this year, we saw a fair bit of that, and we've talked a decent amount about that publicly. With that said, as prices continue to move, gold today around $2,500 an ounce, silver back and forth around $30 an ounce. Gold certainly at record levels, silver near record levels, absence kind of the silver run of the early 1970s. We've seen less buyback business, so which tells us that a lot of that Precious Metals, which have been sitting kind of in family, you know, sitting on the shelf in multigenerational family collections, has come back into the market and has already been digested to the market. So that's a good thing for us.
Anyone else have a question? We got time. Yes, sir.
When people are bringing things back into the market, and you're buying physical, how do you go out and buy physical, assay it, and know what you're buying? In other words, an ounce of gold is an ounce of gold. You know what I'm saying?
... So, again, given the, given the volume of business that we do, and we have two main distribution centers, Las Vegas and Dallas, we have a system, a series of technology that lets us basically test. So if you were to send us back a hundred gold coins, we will get a hundred gold coins. The box will. Let me just walk you through the process. First of all, the box will get opened under camera. So we will physically go through the box and one by one, in front of the camera, count out a hundred coins. So there's never a dispute between you and us about what we've received in terms of quantity. So that's first. Then we will go through and test and make sure that what you've sent us is accurate.
You know, we live in a world where occasionally, either intentionally or unintentionally, just like with currency, there are some bad currency out there. We have to make sure that everything we receive is authentic, so we test it one by one. Very careful. Yeah.
Do you give them a price? And I say, "I'm gonna send you 100 gold," and you say you'll pay me $2,500 subject to... In other words, we establish a price today, and then you mean two weeks from now when you ascertain that those are legitimate?
Yes.
So in other words, I can get a price today-
Yes.
-subject to-
Yes.
Proceed. Okay.
Yeah. So what we do basically is we give you a price relative to the market benchmark.
Right.
So the benchmark, if it takes you two weeks to put your package together and send it to us by USPS, let's say, right? Obviously, the commodity price can change, so what we're basically in agreement with you is we will pay you $1 over, $3 over, wherever we set the price with you, and you know that basically that's what you're getting based upon the underlying commodity price. And A-Mark, as a trader, you can just go to the website and see what we're using as a benchmark price, but that, that's the spot price that sits in the market. So it's spot plus.
Does anyone else have any other questions? I know we're just about at time here.
Chris?
One more quick one.
Yeah. After gold and silver, what's the most purchased precious metal?
Platinum.
I see.
Yeah.
Has that changed at all? You know, like-
There are four core Precious Metals, so along with platinum, gold, silver, platinum, and palladium. So platinum is by far the... It's much smaller in a relative market movement than gold and silver, but it is sizable. The U.S. Mint does on occasion produce platinum coins, and other countries do, too. So we also produce in our own in our privately owned mints, we'll do some copper items in terms of minted products, so we do some copper business, but largely it's gold, silver, and platinum. Okay, thank you.