CaratAntwerp runs short of goods, and the buyers turn to India
A summer shortage of polished goods in Antwerp is steering buyers toward India, where small-stone prices are recovering and the IIJS show opens August 6. A new 10% US duty hangs over the whole trade.
§1One hub empties, another fills.
The diamond trade is thinning into its summer lull, but not evenly. Rapaport's trade wire reports Antwerp running short of goods, a shortage that is pushing buyers toward India even as the calendar empties out. US wholesale is described as steady despite the seasonal slowdown, and the hubs that normally cycle stock among themselves are instead watching demand drift east to the source.
Underneath the quiet is a recovery that has legs at the small end. The RapNet Diamond Index for 0.30-carat goods rose 0.79% on the week and 4.25% over the month, while one-carat commercial stones firmed and the benchmark one-carat category slipped a marginal 0.11% on the week. Small and commercial goods are leading the turn again, the same shape the market showed in the spring, and that is precisely the segment India cuts best.
§2Mumbai reads an opening.
India is reading the moment as an opening. The trade heads into IIJS Premiere in Mumbai, which opens August 6 and runs to the tenth, with unusual optimism for a summer show, and a goods shortage in Antwerp only sharpens the pull toward a country that polishes roughly nine in ten of the world's diamonds by piece. If the recovery is real, the August floor in Mumbai is where it gets confirmed or denied.
the trade walks into August holding two things at once, a genuine recovery in the goods India makes and a fresh tax on selling them to its largest customer.
§3The tariff picks the lane.
The complication arrived last week in Washington. A new 10% US Section 301 duty on Indian goods went live July 24, landing on the exact trade now flowing India's way, while diamonds polished in the European Union keep their exemption, a quiet incentive to route US-bound finishing back through Antwerp. So the trade walks into August holding two things at once, a genuine recovery in the goods India makes and a fresh tax on selling them to its largest customer.
A shortage in one hub and a tax on another is the market telling cutters to pick a lane before the show opens. India has the goods the recovery wants and the tariff it does not, and
the winners in Mumbai will be the houses that already know which stones go to New York through Antwerp and which stay home for everyone else.
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