PRECIOUS METALS TAKE CENTRE STAGE WITH AUSTRALIA’S FIRST GOLD DECUMULATION PLAN
ABC Bullion has launched a pioneering investment product that allows Australians to draw regular cashflow from their precious metal holdings.
2 min
ABC Bullion has launched a pioneering investment product that allows Australians to draw regular cash flow from their precious metal holdings, in a move aimed squarely at retirees and self-managed super funds.
Australasia’s leading bullion specialist, ABC Bullion, has unveiled the country’s first Gold Decumulation Plan (GDP), a product designed to give investors the ability to generate a steady monthly income from their gold and silver investments.
The initiative was launched before more than 700 clients, VIP guests and government ministers at ABC Bullion’s sold-out Precious Metal Forum, “Gold and the New World Order,” held at Sydney’s Ivy Ballroom.
The event featured keynote presentations from WestGold Resources CEO Wayne Bramwell and World Gold Council CEO David Tait, alongside a showcase of the $900,000 Lexus Melbourne Cup trophy, handcrafted by ABC Bullion’s sister company W.J. Sanders.
At the core of GDP is an auto-sales function: investors nominate the monthly dollar amount they wish to receive, and ABC Bullion buys back the required amount of precious metal to fund that payment. The funds are deposited into the client’s bank account on the first business day of each month.
Unlike term deposits, GDP has no lock-in period, offering maximum flexibility. Investors can pause or adjust payments, top up accounts, or convert holdings into physical bullion such as ABC-branded bars and coins. Portfolio tracking and transactions are available online 24/7.
Jordan Eliseo, General Manager of ABC Bullion, said the plan is particularly suited to Australians in or approaching retirement, especially the more than one million who self-manage their superannuation. “Gold has outperformed mainstream asset classes like shares and property over the past twenty-five years, averaging nearly 10% annual growth since 2000,” Eliseo said.
“The ABC Bullion Gold Decumulation Plan provides access to precious metals investments combined with the ability to generate monthly cashflow through fractional sales of precious metals to meet cashflow needs and lifestyle goals”.
Eliseo added that the appeal lies in gold’s resilience across economic cycles. “GDP is likely to be particularly appealing to Australians either already in or approaching retirement,” he noted, pointing to research showing that an investor who put $100,000 into gold in 1999 and withdrew $500 monthly would today have received $153,000 in income and still hold more than $420,000 worth of gold.
With gold prices rising and the Reserve Bank of Australia cutting rates to 3.60% in August, demand for stable, alternative investments is expected to increase. ABC Bullion says GDP uniquely caters to that demand, combining liquidity, flexibility and inflation protection in one platform.
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Parts for iPhones to cost more owing to surging demand from AI companies.
4 min
Apple has dominated the electronics supply chain for years. No more.
Artificial-intelligence companies are writing huge checks for chips, memory, specialised glass fibre and more, and they have begun to out-duel Apple in the race to secure components.
Suppliers accustomed to catering to Apple’s every whim are gaining the leverage to demand that the iPhone maker pay more.
Apple’s normally generous profit margins will face pressure this year, analysts say, and consumers could eventually feel the hit.
Chief Executive Tim Cook mentioned the problem in a Thursday earnings call, saying Apple was seeing constraints in its chip supplies and that memory prices were increasing significantly.
Those comments appeared to weigh on Apple shares, which traded flat despite blowout iPhone sales and record company profit.
“Apple is getting squeezed for sure,” said Sravan Kundojjala, who analyses the industry for research firm SemiAnalysis.
AI chip leader Nvidia recently became the largest customer of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing , or TSMC, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said on a podcast.
Apple had been TSMC’s biggest customer by a wide margin for years. TSMC is the world’s leading manufacturer of advanced chips for AI servers, smartphones and other computing devices.
Spokesmen for Apple and TSMC declined to comment.
The big computers that handle AI tasks don’t look like the smartphones consumers own, but many companies supply components for both. In particular, memory chips are in short supply as companies such as OpenAI, Alphabet’s Google, Meta , Microsoft and others collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI computing capacity.
“The rate of increase in the price of memory is unprecedented,” said Mike Howard , an analyst for research firm TechInsights.
That applies both to the flash memory chips that store photos and videos, called NAND, as well as the memory used to run apps quickly, called DRAM.
By the end of this year, the price of DRAM will quadruple from 2023 levels, and NAND will more than triple, estimates TechInsights.
Howard estimates that Apple could pay $57 more for the two types of memory that go into the base-model iPhone 18 due this fall compared with the base model iPhone 17 currently on sale. For a device that retails for $799, that would be a big hit to profit margins.
Apple’s purchasing power and expertise in designing advanced electronics long made it an unrivaled Goliath among the Asian companies that make most of the iPhone’s parts and assemble the device.
Apple spends billions of dollars a year on NAND, for instance, according to people familiar with the figures, likely making it the single biggest buyer globally. Suppliers flocked to win Apple’s business, hoping to leverage its know-how and prestige to attract other customers.
These days, however, “the companies now pushing the boundaries of human‑scale engineering are the ones like Nvidia,” said Ming-chi Kuo, an analyst with TF International Securities.
Demand for AI hardware is poised to keep growing rapidly. Apple’s spending growth is modest in comparison with what is being spent to fill up AI data centers, even though it is breaking records with huge sales of the iPhone 17.
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are raising the price of a type of DRAM chip for Apple, according to people familiar with Apple’s supply chain.
Big AI companies pay generously and are willing to lock in supply and make upfront payments, giving the South Korean chip makers leverage against the iPhone maker.
Apple signs long-term contracts for memory, but it has used its heft to squeeze suppliers.
Its contracts have empowered it to negotiate prices as often as weekly, and to even refuse to buy any memory from a supplier if Apple didn’t view the price as favorable, according to people familiar with its memory purchases.
To boost leverage with suppliers, Apple even began stocking more inventory of memory. That was atypical for Cook, who normally cuts inventory to the bone to maximize Apple’s cash flow.
Apple is fighting not only for current deliveries but also for the attention of engineers at suppliers.
Glass scientists who worked on developing the smoothest and lightest smartphone displays are now also spending time on specialised glass for packaging advanced AI processing chips, according to industry executives.
Makers of sensors and other gizmos inside the iPhone are winning new business from AI companies such as OpenAI that are developing their own hardware.
Still, suppliers said they were far from giving up on business with Apple. Working with Apple is a form of education, they said, because it remains one of the most demanding and disciplined customers in the industry.
TSMC, the Taiwanese chip manufacturer, has built successive generations of its most advanced chips with Apple as its lead customer, relying on the big predictable demand for iPhones.
Now that TSMC is doing more business with Nvidia and other AI companies, people with knowledge of the chip supply chain said Apple was exploring whether some lower-end processors could be made by someone other than TSMC.
One of Apple’s biggest profit-spinners is selling extra memory for far more than the memory chips cost the company.
Last fall Apple discontinued the iPhone Pro model with 128 gigabytes of storage.
Customers who want that model must now start at 256 gigabytes and pay $100 more—the type of move that could be repeated this year to help Apple offset higher costs, wrote Craig Moffett, an analyst at Moffett Nathanson, in an investor note.
However, Apple isn’t expected to raise the price of its next iPhone models over similarly equipped iPhone 17s, said Kuo, the analyst.
News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services.
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