Carat76.9 million carats, 3.1% of the value: Dubai gives lab-grown its own desk
DMCC has split lab-grown diamonds into a standalone vertical. The 2025 figures it published alongside show volume up 91.5% to 76.9 million carats and value up 7.5% to $1.3 billion. Those two rates are the story.
§1A separate desk for a separate trade.
The Dubai Multi Commodities Centre announced on 30 August that it is establishing a standalone Lab-Grown Diamond Vertical, a separate trading and licensing platform for man-made stones rather than a line inside its existing diamond business. The figures published with the announcement cover calendar 2025: 76.9 million carats traded, up 91.5% year on year, at a value of $1.3 billion, up 7.5%. DMCC also puts the rise since 2022 at 109%, from 36.8 million carats, and sizes the global sector at about $30 billion.
§2Two growth rates twelve points apart.
The two growth rates do not sit comfortably together, and the gap between them is the number worth carrying. If volume rose 91.5% and value rose 7.5%, the implied 2024 base is 40.16 million carats worth about $1.209 billion, or $30.11 a carat. The 2025 figure is $16.91 a carat. On DMCC's own two percentages, the average price of a lab-grown carat moving through Dubai fell 43.86% in a single year. Ahmed Bin Sulayem, DMCC's executive chairman and chief executive, said lab-grown diamonds have reached the point where "they need dedicated market infrastructure". The price series underneath is what that infrastructure will have to be built on.
they need dedicated market infrastructure
§3A fifth of the carats, a thirty-second of the value.
Set the lab-grown line against the whole Dubai book and the proportions come into focus. This paper reported on 15 July, from DMCC's own 2025 ledger, that the emirate's total diamond trade reached $41.7 billion on 359.5 million carats. Lab-grown is therefore 21.39% of the carats Dubai handled last year and 3.12% of the dollars. Put another way, the average carat crossing Dubai was worth $115.99 and the average lab-grown carat was worth $16.91, about one-seventh as much. A fifth of the volume is generating a thirty-second of the value.
§4Why separation is the right call, and where the risk sits.
For a trading hub that is an argument for separation rather than against it. Goods that move in these volumes at these prices need different licensing, different storage economics and different settlement from stones worth a hundred times more per carat, and mixing them inside one set of statistics makes both harder to read. The commercial risk sits elsewhere: a vertical is a fixed piece of infrastructure and the price line running through it has fallen by more than two fifths in a year on the operator's own arithmetic. Dubai is building a permanent room for a trade whose unit economics are still moving fast.
The announcement will be read in the trade as Dubai blessing lab-grown, and that is the smaller half of it. The larger half is that DMCC has now published, in two percentages twelve points apart, the clearest public statement anyone has made this year of what is actually happening to lab-grown prices at wholesale.
Volume nearly doubled and value barely moved. Any retailer still setting lab-grown margins off a 2024 cost sheet should read those two numbers together and then read their own.
The trade, filed to your inbox before the New York open.
Prices, tenders and the one story that moved the industry overnight — read in ninety seconds.
Subscribe free →