$151.60 a carat in Antwerp, on the thinnest rough month in five years
Antwerp imported 1,590,026 carats of rough in July for $241,050,713, the lowest monthly volume in the fifty-five months AWDC publishes. The average paid was $151.60 a carat, against $88.63 in June.
By The Diamonds Desk
What changed
The Antwerp World Diamond Centre publishes its rough diamond import series month by month in machine-readable form on its own site, and the July 2026 entry reads 1,590,026.12 carats for $241,050,713. Divided out, that is $151.60 a carat, against $88.63 in June, a rise of 71.05% on this desk's arithmetic.
What it means
- The honest headline here is not that rough got expensive, it is that Antwerp nearly stopped buying it. A 49% year-on-year collapse in carats through the world's largest rough trading centre is a demand signal the per-carat average actively hides, which is what makes this series useful monthly and dangerous quoted once.
- Watch the carat column through August. If it holds under two million for a fourth month, the run stops being a summer and starts being a level.
Key figures
| rough imported, lowest of 55 months | 1,590,026 |
|---|---|
| paid for them | $241.1M |
| average a carat, on June's $88.63 | $151.60 |
| three-month average, May to July | $117.14 |
Source: AWDC rough imports, July 2026
A per-carat average jumped 71% and it is not a price
Read alone, the per-carat figure looks like a rough market that has turned hard in a single month. It is not, and the reason is in the other column.
Antwerp rough imports, month by month, 2026
Source: AWDC rough imports, July 2026
The three thinnest months in five years are the three just gone
The carat column is the story. The published series runs from January 2022 and now covers fifty-five complete months. July 2026, at 1.59 million carats, is the lowest of all of them. June 2026, at 1,834,966.27 carats, is the second lowest. May 2026, at 1,989,371.16 carats, is the third.
The three thinnest months Antwerp has recorded in five years of its own data are the three months just gone, in that order. Against July 2025, when the centre took in 3,118,013.12 carats for $414,238,026, the volume is down 49.01% and the value down 41.81%.
| Figure | |
|---|---|
| March | 5.54M ct |
| April | 3.75M ct |
| May | 1.99M ct |
| June | 1.83M ct |
| July | 1.59M ct |
July 2026 is the lowest of the 55 months AWDC publishes, back to January 2022 Bars are carats imported, scaled to March. The dollars-per-carat average rose as the carats fell. Carat Capital graphics desk, on AWDC's own published series.
Antwerp shipped out 1.73 carats for every carat it took in
That is why the per-carat number moved, and it is why this desk will not call it a price. A trade-flow average divides the dollars that landed by the carats that landed, so it tracks the size and quality mix of whatever parcels cleared customs that month, not the price of a constant basket.
When the volume halves, a handful of better parcels can lift the average without any stone anywhere repricing.
The three-month view damps it: May, June and July together are 5,414,363.55 carats for $634,237,819, or $117.14 a carat. That is the figure to carry, and even $151.60 is well short of the series high of $183.74 set in April 2022, on nearly three times the carats.
The export side confirms the direction rather than the price. Antwerp shipped out 2,751,303.49 carats of rough in July for $255,048,440, an average of $92.70 a carat. The centre exported 1.73 carats of rough for every carat it imported, and sent out more rough by value than it took in.
A trading centre that ships more rough than it receives, three months into its thinnest run on its own record, is drawing down rather than restocking. The shape of that is consistent with what this paper reported on 14 July, when Antwerp's first half showed rough volumes rising as rough values fell.
This is also the answer to a question the tape desk put to the Editor this morning. caratwire recommended adopting the AWDC series as this paper's monthly rough mark, on the grounds that it is public, monthly, self-hosted and machine-readable, and paired the recommendation with its own warning that a single month read alone will mislead.
Both halves are right, and the July print is the demonstration. This desk adopts it, dated to the month it covers and never to the day it is read, and prints the three-month average beside every single-month figure.
The story so far
Go deeper
Method
July 2026 is the lowest of the 55 months AWDC publishes, back to January 2022