i have a friend who is a gold and silver manufacturer in Malaysia. he has several other businesses but he is now going more aggressive in silver manufacturing. i was having a conversation with him this morning and we talked about custom mintage of silver. there are 2 way of working together:
1. we provide silver for him and he will mint it for us according to our design. he will only charge on the workmanship.
2. we buy silver from him (according to floating price) and he mint it for us. which he will charge us both for silver and workmanship.
the cost for him to produce a minting mold is RM1500, therefore he would have to cater the cost into workmanship.
the price is really up for negotiation depending on the design, quantity and size. especially quantity. i roughly asked him how much would it cost for a 1 oz American Silver Eagle like design, he replied the workmanship would probably cost RM7 / coin.
i'm wondering if there is any interest for custom design mintage from us?
please drop me a PM if anyone is keen with the idea of custom mintage, probably we can have some fun ourselves

side note: we also talked about some of the silver sellers buy back policy in the market. although a lot of seller do offer buy back, when it comes to really bringing the silver back to the sellers, the sellers are making a lot of excuses. my friend is working something with a hong kong party for the buy back policy. so if we are getting silver from him, can safely assume that he would honour the policy.