CaratDubai's $41.7 billion year: the trade's center of gravity moves
The emirate's diamond trade rose 16 percent in 2025 to a record $41.7 billion on 359.5 million carats, up 43 percent — the first time its value and volume records fell in the same year. Antwerp's entire first half of 2026, for scale: $10.6 billion.
The Dubai Multi Commodities Centre published its 2025 ledger this week, and the numbers read like a coronation. The emirate's diamond trade reached $41.7 billion, up 16 percent from $35.8 billion in 2024 and past the previous peak of $40.9 billion set in 2011. Volume surged 43 percent to 359.5 million carats.
Hubs are habits, and habits compound. Dubai now sits between the mines, the Gulf's capital and India's factories with record throughput and no serious congestion — the argument for routing around it gets weaker every year, whatever the certification bodies prefer.
The number to watch next is the polished share: if Dubai keeps converting transit rough into priced polished, the trade will have to admit that its center of gravity did not drift. It moved.
IThe ledger reads like a coronation
It is the first time Dubai has set records in value and volume simultaneously — a hub growing in both directions at once, in a global market that spent most of 2025 shrinking.
IINinety-six percent of the value is still natural
The composition rewards a close read. Natural diamonds dominated at $39.9 billion, 96 percent of total value, with rough volumes up 34 percent to 205.2 million carats and polished trade up 25 percent to $18.7 billion. Colored gemstones set their own record at $1.1 billion, up 48 percent.
And the fine print carries the era's signature: synthetic and industrial diamonds accounted for roughly 39 percent of total carat volume — a vast tonnage worth a sliver of the value, which is the lab-grown economy in a single statistic.
IIIThe physical trade already voted
The five-year trajectory is the real story. Since 2020, Dubai's physical diamond volumes have doubled and trade value has grown nearly 140 percent; polished value alone is up 246 percent, with average per-carat value rising eightfold as the emirate climbed from transit stop to pricing venue.
DMCC chief executive Ahmed Bin Sulayem credits a deliberate build of "the world's most connected, transparent, and efficient precious-stones ecosystem" — infrastructure, tax treatment and, unspoken but understood, a jurisdiction that stayed open to Russian-origin goods the G7 hubs restricted.
Put the number against the old center. Antwerp's combined trade ran $10.6 billion in the entire first half of 2026 — a good half, up 9 percent, and still barely a quarter of Dubai's annual run rate.
The Belgian hub remains the standard-setter for compliance and finance, but the physical trade has voted with its parcels for a decade, and 2025 was the year the vote stopped being close.
The same week these figures landed, Bin Sulayem lost the World Federation of Diamond Bourses presidency to Mumbai's Mehul Shah — a reminder that the trade's political institutions and its logistics map are moving on different clocks.
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