Platinum Guild International (PGI) will close its United States office on 31 December 2026, as part of a global restructuring that also closes its offices in Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong. PGI USA and South Korea will cease operations on 31 December, Japan on 30 December, and operations in Hong Kong are already winding down. From 2027, the organisation’s dedicated operations will continue only in China and India.
PGI has promoted platinum jewellery since it was founded in 1975. Its United States office, based in New York, opened in 1992, so the closure ends a 34-year presence in a market where, for a generation, it did much of the explaining of platinum to retailers and to the people who buy from them.
In the statement shared with the trade press, PGI said it is evolving its operating model to focus its resources where they can generate the greatest sustainable platinum jewellery demand and industry value. The same statement was careful on one point: this transition, it said, reflects a change in operating structure, not a change in confidence in these markets. PGI said it would continue to support the industry through its education platforms, technical expertise, market intelligence, standards leadership and partnerships. Jenny Luker, president of PGI USA, will remain in her role through the end of the year.
The numbers reported this autumn do not read as a collapse in the United States. The World Platinum Investment Council, in its September Platinum Quarterly, forecast world platinum jewellery demand to fall by 15% in 2026, to 1.88 million ounces. It placed the contraction largely in China, and described Europe and North America as comparatively resilient, supported by bridal demand and by platinum’s still-substantial discount to gold. PGI’s own June business review reported that North American platinum jewellery demand had risen by 6% in 2025, while gold jewellery demand fell by 10%. In January, PGI’s Retail Barometer, a survey of 300 United States jewellers, found that 76% planned to add platinum inventory in 2026. Whatever is driving the restructuring, it is not a North American market that had already given up on the metal.
What actually leaves with the New York office is the teaching. PGI USA’s training programmes taught sales associates and bench jewellers how to sell and how to work with platinum, a metal that does not explain itself at the counter. Platinum is denser than gold, so a piece of the same size carries more metal by weight, and its price cannot be read honestly from a price per ounce alone. Its case rests on weight, on durability, and on how it differs from white gold, and someone has to make that case, piece by piece, to a buyer usually meeting the metal for the first time.
After 31 December, more of that work may fall to stores and to their suppliers: training their own staff to explain platinum against white gold, and framing its price around weight and durability instead of around the ticker. PGI says its education and expertise will still reach the United States from its remaining offices. The metal itself has not changed, and neither have its working properties. What changes, at the start of 2027, is who stands at the bench and at the counter and does the explaining.
— Tom