CaratDubai sets a second Diamond Week for October 26
DMCC will run the second Dubai Diamond Week from October 26 to 29, with the Italian Exhibition Group co-hosting a sourcing show. The emirate traded a record $41.7 billion and 359.5 million carats last year.
§1A date on the diary.
Dubai has put a date on its second attempt to become the room the diamond trade meets in. DMCC will hold Dubai Diamond Week from October 26 to 29, four days of conference sessions alongside a sourcing exhibition co-hosted with the Italian Exhibition Group. The first edition ran last year. The second arrives with a stronger set of numbers behind it and a weaker market in front of it, which is the combination that decides whether a trade fair becomes a fixture.
The numbers are the argument. Dubai's rough and polished trade reached $41.7 billion and 359.5 million carats in 2025, the highest on record, with natural stones accounting for 95.8% of the value. The Dubai Diamond Exchange now anchors an ecosystem of close to 1,400 companies and operates the largest tender facility in the business. A city that clears that volume does not need a conference to prove it matters, but it does need one to convert throughput into governance.
§2Volume is not governance.
That is the harder part of the pitch. Antwerp, Ramat Gan and Mumbai were built on long-standing bourse membership, arbitration and credit, not on tonnage alone. Dubai has spent the past year buying the missing pieces: the 41st World Diamond Congress met there in July, Okavango Diamond Company signed a tender arrangement with the exchange, and Qatar's new bourse joined the World Federation of Diamond Bourses. October's programme is the follow-through, with governments, producers, manufacturers, retailers and technology firms all on the invitation list.
A city that clears that volume does not need a conference to prove it matters
§3October is the point of decision.
The timing is uncomfortable and probably deliberate. October lands after the summer trough and before the festive restock, at the point in the calendar when sightholders decide how much rough they will fund into the new year. De Beers' rough index has sat flat at 68 and 69 across two quarters, Angolan tenders have cleared above expectation, and nobody in the room will be short of an opinion on where the floor is. A trade fair held while prices are still finding their level produces better conversation than one held in a boom.
The useful measure of Dubai Diamond Week will not be attendance. It will be whether any binding trade infrastructure comes out of it, because a conference that convenes the industry without producing arbitration, credit terms or a tender calendar is a very expensive networking event. Dubai has the volume, the exchange and now the diary slot. What it has not yet demonstrated is that a producer in Gaborone or a manufacturer in Surat changes a commercial decision because of something agreed in the emirate rather than merely announced there.
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