Voima Weekly #45 – The price of gold rose by approximately 45 percent in 2025; what happened in the Finnish gold market?

An AI-imagined illustration of Finland’s gold flows: metal moves from the domestic market through refining and the international precious metals market to the wider world.

Correction note: Two technical corrections have been made to the online version after the original email distribution: Voima’s 2025 gold flow has been corrected to two tonnes, and one accidentally duplicated paragraph has been removed. The corrections do not change the conclusions of the article.

The year 2025 was an exceptional one for the Finnish gold market. The price of gold rose strongly, the physical market became more active, significant amounts of old gold began moving out of households, and gold became visibly prominent in Finland’s export statistics.

Finland is not usually thought of as a gold country. In a certain sense, however, it is.

There is significant gold mining activity in Finland. Agnico Eagle’s Kittilä mine produced approximately 6.8 tonnes of gold in 2025.¹ Endomines’ Pampalo mine produced around 0.5 tonnes of gold,² and Dragon Mining’s Finnish operation produced approximately 0.8 tonnes of gold in concentrate.³ In addition, Boliden Harjavalta is a major copper and nickel smelter and refinery where gold is recovered as a by-product of the metallurgical process. Harjavalta is not a gold mine, but its gold production in 2025 was approximately 8 tonnes.⁴

When these figures are set alongside Finnish Customs’ export statistics, the picture begins to take shape. In 2025, Finland exported approximately EUR 1.9 billion worth of non-monetary gold.⁵ The majority of these exports went to Switzerland. Switzerland’s share was so large that it can, in practice, be regarded as Finland’s main gateway into the global precious metals market.

Switzerland’s role is no coincidence. Switzerland is one of the world’s most important centres for gold refining, trading and logistics. A great deal of metal ends up there to be refined, standardised and directed into international liquidity. In Europe, Germany and Italy also play their part in the precious metals refining and recycling market, but in Finland’s 2025 figures Switzerland was clearly the key destination.

Finnish Customs’ figures can be roughly compared with the production and flows of industry participants. Agnico Eagle’s Kittilä mine production of approximately 6.8 tonnes, Boliden Harjavalta’s approximately 8 tonnes of smelter and refinery production, and Voima’s gold flow of two tonnes already account for a significant share of the gold exported to Switzerland. In addition, the overall picture is affected by the metal flows of other operators.

The figures should still be read with caution. Not all gold mined or processed in Finland can be directly linked to a single customs category. Some material moves as concentrate, doré, copper- or gold-bearing material, or as part of another metallurgical product. But the scale is clear: in 2025, an exceptional amount of gold moved out of Finland.

This market, however, was not formed only by mines and smelters. In 2025, an exceptional amount of old gold also began moving out of households. Old rings, broken chains, unused jewellery and inherited gold were sold to buyers who directed the metal onward into the refining chain. The rise in the gold price, tighter household finances, the realisation of inherited gold, and the buyers’ active sourcing work; appointment booking, tours, home visits and visible marketing - together created a powerful wave of selling in the market.

Time will tell whether the third and fourth quarters of 2025 and the beginning of 2026 will go down in history as Finland’s strongest periods for household gold sales. This was not metal accumulated over a single year, but rather a gold reserve built up over decades in Finnish homes, inheritances, drawers and safes, a reserve that began to move when prices rose and buyers became visible.

The phenomenon is nationally interesting. A significant share of the physical gold held by Finnish households moved out of household balance sheets and, through the refining chain, into international markets. No one knows the exact share, but the practical market volumes show that this was not a small phenomenon.

Voima Gold purchased a significant amount of gold from B2B operators during 2025. From Voima Gold’s perspective, this was primarily high-volume, low-margin trading, liquidity management, coordination of metal flows, and managing the infrastructure around customers’ purchases, sales and storage. This is directly linked to the company’s mission: to provide an easy way to own gold in a liquid form. As jewellery, gold is often an unclear and illiquid asset. On a gold account, it becomes a more understandable, trackable and easily bought, sold and stored form of wealth for the customer. The group’s lending company and investment services company expand this idea toward financing and wealth management, but the core remains the same: gold as a physical, ownable and liquidly managed asset.

This distinction is important to understand. In the gold market, revenue can appear enormous, but not all revenue is of the same quality. Low-margin trading of large metal flows is a different business from, for example, buying gold from households, where profitability is based on a larger spread between the purchase price and the metal’s world market value.

The same phenomenon was also visible in the physical value chain. It is illustrative that Voima Refining’s metal analysis and processing volumes grew especially in the second half of 2025 to approximately ten times the original forecasts. It is striking how large a phenomenon the selling of gold jewellery became, especially during Q3–Q4/2025 and partly during Q1/2026. Since then, volumes have begun to decline, which may suggest that the phenomenon was at least partly the release of a gold reserve accumulated over years or decades.

At the same time, from the perspective of storage, the development was different. Storage volumes did not grow in the same proportion as gold sales volumes. This is an important observation. When gold began to move, a large share of it did not move into long-term Finnish storage or safekeeping, but exited the market through the refining chain.

The benefits of the 2025 market were not evenly distributed. Relative to capital employed, the greatest leverage may have belonged to those operators that bought gold from households clearly below the metal’s full market value and quickly directed it onward into the refining chain. Owners of mining companies benefited from the rise in gold prices through the value and profitability of production, although the benefit depended on each company’s cost base and starting valuation. In low-margin trading, the benefit was seen more in volumes, customer flows and market position. Processing, refining and logistics also received their share of the increased metal flows.

But the most important observation of the year may not be who achieved the best result. It may be how gold was perceived.

Finnish households did not see their gold jewellery as monetary wealth. They saw old rings, broken chains, unused jewellery and items forgotten in drawers. Buyers saw the same metal differently. They saw grams, purities, melt value, the refining chain and the world market price.

The seller saw jewellery, while the buyer saw monetary metal. That was where the difference emerged. Finland as a whole did not strengthen its gold balance sheet; it lightened it.

Selling gold can be a justified decision. The need for cash can be real, and life circumstances may require it. But the scale of the phenomenon makes it an economically interesting subject to examine. If significant amounts of gold leave Finland through both the mining industry and household sales, and what remains in its place is euros or other currency, we should ask whether the long-term purchasing power of households and the nation is being strengthened or weakened.

Gold is not a perfect asset. It pays no interest, produces no cash flow, and its price does not rise in a straight line. But gold is also no one’s promise. It is not a bank’s liability, a state currency, or a digital entry in someone else’s system. It is a physical asset whose value cannot be printed into existence.

The conclusion is simple: gold should be viewed as part of wealth, not merely as jewellery or an item to be sold. Its role may be small, but for many households and institutions it can be a justified part of long-term diversification and purchasing power protection.

A price increase alone does not tell us whether selling is the best long-term decision. That is why every seller should assess not only today’s price, but also their own financial situation and objectives.

The market functioned efficiently in 2025: gold moved from sellers to refining and onward into international markets. At the same time, it raises the question of whether Finland should in the future place more emphasis on owning and storing gold as well - not only on producing and exporting it.

The events of 2025 showed that gold remains a significant but often underestimated asset in Finland. In the long term, the discussion may not be only about the price of gold, but about what role gold plays in the wealth of Finnish households, companies and institutions.

Weekly will take a summer break after this issue and return in late summer or early autumn. Thank you to all readers for following along during the spring and early summer. We will then continue again with questions of the economy, money, ownership and purchasing power.

– Marko Viinikka
Founder, CEO
Voima Gold Oy

Disclaimer: Voima Weeklies are the personal writings of the undersigned. They do not necessarily represent the official view of Voima Gold Oy or any other company, nor do they constitute investment advice or a recommendation to purchase securities.