I was fortunate enough to choose to collect 1/2 ounce panda coins a while ago and my only regret on today's date is not owning more of them.
As the market for graded Chinese coins continues to improve from it's recent slump I thought I'd take pause to illustrate some interesting new market statistics.
As NGC is currently the preeminent grading company for Chinese coins let us start with the most recent census on 25JUL16:
https://www.ngccoin.com/census/The homepage will greet you with a list of 10 countries organized by "most graded."
It comes as no surprise that leading the way is the United States with: 24,276,343 coins graded.
In second place we have China: 1,656,016 coins graded
On the surface this 7% of the US figure seems like a meager number.... but not so when you look at the total of "World Coins" graded to date.
South Africa: 392,859
Australia: 383,239
Canada: 324,331
Great Britain: 192,231
Russia: 128,641
Mexico: 89,021
Poland: 67,718
Germany: 59,431
What is significant is that if we add all the numbers of graded coins from the 3rd through 10th most commonly graded country, as of today there are still 18,545 more Chinese coins graded by NGC to date.
This is approximately the total number of G200Y (2001-2016 pandas graded to date): 18,938
What's interesting about that number is that 80% of the 2001-2016 graded G200Y pandas are 2016 pandas with a number of 15,106
Market speculation aside, these numbers are interesting to consider.
Graded NGC Chinese coins are eclipsing all other World coins by a large margin and their popularity is rising exponentially.
What this means for the future of the hobby is yet to be determined, but I'd hazard to guess that that Chinese coins will continue rise for a while and will outperform other world coins as an investment.
Panda Halves