World gold · 8 min read
The Krugerrand: a complete history
The Krugerrand is the coin that invented an entire market. Before it, an ordinary person who wanted to own gold faced an awkward choice between jewellery and bars. The Krugerrand changed that in 1967, becoming the world's first modern bullion coin, a piece of gold made deliberately accessible to the everyday investor. Within little more than a decade it dominated global gold coin sales, and it inspired almost every bullion coin that followed.
A coin for the working investor
South Africa was, and is, one of the world's great gold producers, and by the mid-1960s its mining industry wanted a way to sell gold directly to private individuals around the world. The South African Mint and the Rand Refinery collaborated on the answer: a one-ounce gold coin, legal tender but carrying no fixed face value, whose worth simply tracked the daily gold price. The first Krugerrands were struck on 3 July 1967. The concept was new and shrewd, gold you could buy by the coin rather than the bar, with a guaranteed weight and purity backed by the state.
Paul Kruger and the springbok
The name fuses two pieces of South African identity: Paul Kruger, the bearded president of the old South African Republic who led the Boers around the turn of the twentieth century, and the rand, the national currency. Kruger's portrait, engraved from a likeness by Otto Schultz, sits on the obverse, with the country's name in both Afrikaans and English. The reverse carries a pronking springbok, the national animal, designed by the sculptor Coert Steynberg and originally seen on an earlier South African five-shilling coin. The reverse also spells out the coin's content, one ounce of fine gold, in both languages.
Built tough: the 22 carat alloy
A Krugerrand is not pure gold. Each one-ounce coin weighs 33.93 grams, of which exactly one troy ounce, 31.10 grams, is gold; the rest is copper. That makes it 22 carat, 91.67% gold, the same crown-gold standard used by the sovereign. The copper does two things: it gives the Krugerrand its distinctive warm, slightly orange tone, and it makes the coin harder and more resistant to the scratches and knocks that a coin designed to be handled and traded would inevitably suffer. The one-ounce coin measures 32.77 mm across.
Domination and the sanctions years
The Krugerrand was a runaway success. By 1980 it accounted for around 90% of the world's gold coin market, an astonishing share. That same success drew imitators: Canada launched the Gold Maple Leaf in 1979, the United States the Gold Eagle in 1986 and Britain the Britannia in 1987, all responding to the demand the Krugerrand had proven existed. Then politics intervened. Through the 1970s and 1980s, opposition to South Africa's apartheid regime led many Western countries to impose sanctions, and the Krugerrand, as the country's most visible export, was banned from import in the United States and elsewhere. Sales fell sharply, and the rival coins filled the gap.
The fractional sizes and the return
In September 1980 the range expanded beyond the one-ounce coin to include half-ounce, quarter-ounce and tenth-ounce sizes, making smaller amounts of gold affordable. After apartheid ended, most sanctions were lifted from 1991, and the Krugerrand returned to the international market. Today it is once again among the best-selling bullion coins in the world by volume. In 2017, for its fiftieth anniversary, the Mint introduced a silver Krugerrand alongside the gold, extending the family for the first time.
Collecting and storing Krugerrands
For investors the Krugerrand is prized for exactly the qualities it was built with: instant recognition, deep liquidity and a guaranteed gold content. For collectors, early dates, proof issues and the fractional sizes all offer interest. Because the coin is 22 carat with a copper content, it is more durable than a pure-gold coin, but it still benefits from a capsule to keep fingerprints and edge wear off the surface, which matters for graded and proof examples. The one-ounce coin at 32.77 mm sits in a 32 mm capsule; the fractional coins step down to 27 mm, 22 mm and 16 mm.
See the recommended capsules for every size of this coin.
More in our coin histories.