PalladiumBlog.de

In 1998 only a small mintage of the 1998 Emu has been minted in BU version, before the production has been paused completely. Because of the up going palladium price, it was harder and harder to sell the coins. The Perth Mint has not finished the mintage, they have only suspended it. So the possibility for the mintage of the complete planned amount of 5000 pieces exists.

Probably because of the palladium coins of Canada (in 2006 was issued a so called „Constellation Set“ with coins with a mintage of 300 per coin) in 2006 the Perth Mint was requested to mint palladium coins again. The Perth Mint declared that this was the wish of an overseas dealer. In Germany the 1998 palladium coins has been appeared in bigger amounts and because of this, I think that a German dealer, was responsible for this further mintages. Because of the sales problems the Perth Mint was not sure, if they should produce the coins in the maximum mintage. So they supposable they have produced „two smaller amounts“ of the 1998 EMU coins (which are included in the planned total amount of 5000 pieces), but the maximum mintage seems not to be reached. The coins of this „test amounts“ are the same, but there is a difference with the packaging in the capsule. It is possible to see the edge of the coin in the capsule in one part of the issue and not (or hard to see) possible to see it in the other capsule (you could see it in the photo). This „new mintages“ has been delivered to the dealer, who has given this order to the Perth Mint to see how this sales gain interest or not. It seems that this test has not been successfully enough, because the Perth Mint is not planning further issues for the moment. The official arguments are that the Perth Mint is not satisfied with the quality of the mintage. It is not easy to mint coins in Palladium, because there is a high error quote and it is expensive to recycle this scraps.

Finally it would be important to say that the price of this coin has decreased because of this extra mintages from around 1000 Euro before to around 300 Euro. This example shows that the amount of palladium coin collectors is very little at the moment, but there could be a change in this behaviour, because the collecting of palladium coins offers a broad variety of different coins, with only very little different issues.