CaratIIJS published 50,000 visitors and no order book
GJEPC's IIJS Bharat Premiere closed on 10 August with more than 50,000 trade visitors, 2,100 exhibitors and 2,700 international buyers from over 80 countries. Eight days on, this desk can find no published business value for the show.
§1Every figure counts people.
India's flagship gem-and-jewellery show closed eight days ago and the trade still has no idea what was bought at it. IIJS Bharat Premiere ran across two Mumbai venues, the Jio World Convention Centre at BKC from 5 to 9 August and the Bombay Exhibition Centre at NESCO from 6 to 10 August. The published account of it, reported by IDEX on 10 August, is more than 50,000 trade visitors, 2,100 exhibitors and 2,700 international buyers from more than 80 countries. Every one of those figures counts people. None of them counts money.
This paper set the test itself before the doors opened. Previewing the show on 28 July, this desk wrote that registrations measure hope and that the tickets written between 6 and 10 August would show whether India's recovery was broad enough to survive the loss of a little American duty-free room. The recommendation was to watch the order books, not the footfall. Eight days after the close, this is where it stands. The footfall is public and the order book is not.
The footfall is public and the order book is not.
§2The absence is the finding.
The absence is this desk's finding and is stated as such rather than left as an omission. Searching for a post-show business value across GJEPC's own channels and the trade press on 18 August returned attendance, exhibitor counts, ministerial speeches and floor-level colour, and no aggregate turnover figure for the 42nd edition. It is possible one exists somewhere this desk did not reach, and it is possible one is still being compiled. What is established is that eight days after a show of this size closed, a reader looking for what it did in business could not find a number.
Scale is what makes the gap matter. IIJS is routinely described as the second-largest business-to-business gem-and-jewellery show in the world after JCK Las Vegas, and it is the single clearest read available on Indian sourcing demand in any given year. Its close falls at exactly the moment the trade needs one: this paper's own 28 July reporting recorded Indian gross gems-and-jewellery exports up 26.5% in June to about $2.21 billion against a flat quarter and rough imports down roughly a third, a set of figures that can be read as a restart or as a single month. A turnover figure from the August show would have settled which. An attendance figure cannot.
A trade show that reports its gate and not its till is publishing a marketing number, and the industry has begun to accept marketing numbers where transaction numbers used to be. This paper made the same complaint about Sotheby's yesterday, in a different corner of the same trade, and the shape is identical: the figure that flatters is published quickly and the figure that would answer a question is not published at all. Fifty thousand people walked the floor. Somebody knows what they spent, and the count that would tell a Surat polisher whether to run the second shift in September is the one still missing.
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