$151.60 a carat in Antwerp, on the thinnest rough month in five years

§1A per-carat average jumped 71% and it is not a price.

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. 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.

§2The 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%.

§3Antwerp 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.