Coin Mintage

To my understanding many coins are produced to demand.
If demand decreases they just stop making them, so if they quoted a mintage of 20,000 it could end up being a lot less.

eg. the 2007 Red Breasted Nuthatch coin had a suggested mintage of 25,000... demand at that time was low resulting in about 10,581 minted.
The series has picked up now and the coin along with a few others have gone up in price considerably.

When coins are first released, most of them have a listed maximum mintage that can't be exceeded. Not all coins reach their maximums, so the final mintage for non-sell-out coins is determined by adding the sales figures available in the RCM's Annual Report for the year of issue and the following year. Any coins remaining in inventory after their sales period is closed are destroyed.

So, if a coin has a max mintage of 25,000 but only sells 10,000, the final number of available coins is 10,000.

Concerning the mintage... one very bad decision about mintage was taken by Perth Mint (Australia) this year.
They have their bullion serie of Kookaburra since 1990. First years, the serie wasn't that popular so real mintage were below official ones (as low as 74k for an official mintage of 300k).
With these "real" mintage, some years were difficult to get and had a nice premium, for a more than 20-years serie, people completed their collection, etc.

Anyway, long story short, Peth Mint decided last year to complete the official mintage and RE-mint some 1992 and other years coin! And this was a REAL RE-mint... I mean they didn't mint new coin with same design and two dates or something, they actually RE-minted "official 1992 coins", the exact same coin, twenty years later!! Guess what, older 1992 coin just lose their premium as new GEMs were available at the Mint and all over the world!

They justify this in saying that as the official mintage was not reached, they haven't "broke their words" as they just reminted to the original and official limited mintage of 300k....
I don't know if I can link to another forum here, if not please delete but it's explaining this, and it seems they have done the same thing with many years: https://www.kitcomm.com/showthread.php?t=103324
And even if they haven't done it yet, many years have lost their premium!

So, I'm not sure if RCM could potentially do the same or something in their by-laws forbid them to do so... but I really hope there is!!

Take the nuthatch as an example: Very high premium, very rare. RCM decide tomorrow to RE-mint the remaining 12-13k that were destroyed back then. Goodbye premium, goodbye money that one just spent to complete his collection, as brand new GEM nuthatch would be available to order officially at the mint for... issue price!

Anyway, I don't want to scare anybody, but honestly, I wouldn't be that comfortable having a few nuthatch (or any other coin that has a high premium because of low "real" mintage over the official one BTW) in my hands right now if RCM could do the same anytime.

^^^ It would undoubtedly result in a class-action if the RCM tried that stunt.

Obviously, if the "new" nuthatch has the actual date (2012), it's not a problem at all.
It's if the remint some exactly the same as the other, with 2007 date and not distinctive mark to see it's a remint.

This is what Perth Mint did and it seems it's not a fraud... so for me Perth Mint will never be a buy-and-hold... ever! If they include something in their by-laws that they can't remint, maybe I'll reconsider but they just compromised ALL of their coin value. Even the ones who were produced at their full mintage, people will not differentiate.
Anyway...