Rhodium prices
Fri Oct 26 2007 Filed in: Bead News
Every week or two someone asks us when Miyuki's
rhodium plated beads will again be available.
Here's the story:
Over the past six or seven years, the market price for rhodium has climbed from around $500 per oz to its current level of over $6,000 per oz.
To put it another way, if the price of gas had gone up by the same amount, we would now be paying $20-25 per gallon or more. Ouch!
As the price steadily increased, Miyuki finally reached a point where they could no longer imagine customers buying rhodium-plated beads, and they stopped producing them. They are working on a substitute but so far have not come up with anything satisfactory.
The affected beads are:
In Delicas: 32 & 32cut, 332, 502 & 502 cut, 509, 510, 511, 512, 513. This applies to all sizes of Delicas.
In other beads: color numbers 192 & 200. (From our stock this only applies to SB-192)
DB 38 is a reasonable substitute for DB 32. There are no alternates for 509 - 513.
Over the past six or seven years, the market price for rhodium has climbed from around $500 per oz to its current level of over $6,000 per oz.
To put it another way, if the price of gas had gone up by the same amount, we would now be paying $20-25 per gallon or more. Ouch!
As the price steadily increased, Miyuki finally reached a point where they could no longer imagine customers buying rhodium-plated beads, and they stopped producing them. They are working on a substitute but so far have not come up with anything satisfactory.
The affected beads are:
In Delicas: 32 & 32cut, 332, 502 & 502 cut, 509, 510, 511, 512, 513. This applies to all sizes of Delicas.
In other beads: color numbers 192 & 200. (From our stock this only applies to SB-192)
DB 38 is a reasonable substitute for DB 32. There are no alternates for 509 - 513.