Dubai's $41.7 billion year: the trade's center of gravity moves

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. 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.

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.

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.

The desk's view: 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.