Gems & Jewellery Trade Data 2026: Find Diamond & Gold Buyers

India shipped $28.5 billion of gems and jewellery in FY25 — and the headline number hides the real story. Cut and polished diamond exports cratered to a 19-year low of $13.3 billion while the UAE quietly overtook London to become the world's second-largest gold hub, clearing roughly $170 billion in bullion in a single year. The map of who buys diamonds, gold, and coloured stones is being redrawn in real time.

For an SME polishing rough in Surat, casting gold jewellery in Rajkot, or growing lab diamonds in Mumbai, the question is no longer "is the market down?" It's "which buyers, in which country, are still placing orders — and at what HS code?" That's a data problem, and it's solvable.

The diamond squeeze: a 19-year low rewrites the buyer map

The diamond pipeline took the hardest hit. Cut and polished diamond (CPD) exports fell 16.75% to $13,292 million, the lowest level in nearly two decades. The cause was twofold: weak demand from the US and China, plus a 10–15% correction in rough diamond prices that compressed value across the chain, according to GJEPC.

When the natural-diamond engine stalls, exporters don't sit still — they hunt for buyers in second-tier markets and pivot product mix. Belgium ($1.60B), the UK ($967.88M), Israel ($612.60M), Singapore ($553.92M), and Thailand ($522.91M) round out the top destinations behind the big three. Each of those flows is a list of named importers a polished-diamond house can target directly.

The exporters who win the next two years aren't the ones with the cheapest rough — they're the ones who know exactly which importer in Antwerp or Hong Kong is still buying their cut, and at what volume.

Lab-grown diamonds: structural, not a fad

Polished lab-grown diamond exports dipped 9.64% to $1,267 million in FY25 — but that's a value story, not a volume one. Falling per-carat prices mask surging units. The global lab-grown diamond market was worth $29.46B in 2025 and is projected to reach $33.54B in 2026, growing at a 13.3% CAGR through 2034. India's own lab-grown market alone is forecast at $3.38B in 2026.

The pricing dynamic is brutal for natural smalls: a 1-carat mined stone now competes head-to-head with a 2-carat lab-grown at the same price point. For a Surat unit deciding whether to grow CVD capacity or stay in natural mêlée, the buyer-demand signal — who's importing lab-grown, where, and in what HS code — is the difference between a bet and a plan.

Gold's centre of gravity has moved to the Gulf

The single biggest structural shift in the sector isn't about stones at all — it's gold. The UAE has overtaken the United Kingdom to become the world's second-largest gold trade hub, clocking over $129 billion in trade, with roughly $170 billion of gold moving through the country in the past year per late-2025 reporting. DMCC's free zone now hosts over 15,000 businesses.

That matters for Indian gold jewellery, silver jewellery, gold bars and bullion, and platinum jewellery exporters because of CEPA: India can now import up to 160 tonnes of gold from the UAE at preferential tariffs, and the UAE is India's #2 export destination at $7.75B. The corridor runs both ways. Meanwhile FY25 was rough at home — gold jewellery exports were flat (-0.11%) and silver jewellery exports collapsed 40.58% per GJEPC — making the Dubai re-export and Gulf retail channels more important, not less.

Coloured stones, pearls, and the fashion-jewellery hedge

Demand hasn't vanished — it's fragmented. Coloured gemstones (ruby, emerald, sapphire), pearls, and studded jewellery follow their own buyer geographies: Bangkok remains the global trading floor for ruby and sapphire, Hong Kong is the pearl and jadeite gateway into mainland China, and the US absorbs the bulk of studded gold jewellery. At the volume end, costume and fashion jewellery, imitation jewellery, and platinum-set pieces are a deliberate hedge — India's artificial jewellery export demand is climbing on affordability even as natural-diamond value slips. An exporter who maps each product to its real importer base spreads risk the way the headline number never can.

The 2026 tariff reset: from punishing to workable

For most of 2025, US buyers faced a 50% duty wall on Indian goods — and the Indian press reported 135,000 to 400,000 gem-sector jobs lost. The February 7, 2026 interim US-India trade framework changed the calculus: tariffs on loose natural diamonds and coloured gemstones dropped to 0%, while finished jewellery now carries roughly 24% (an 18% reciprocal rate plus 6% MFN), down from the prior wall.

The strategic read is clear: ship stones, not finished pieces, into the US — or find finished-jewellery buyers in the UAE and Hong Kong where the math is friendlier. Either way, the move requires a current, country-level view of who's actually importing what.

How ShipScout turns this into a buyer list

Macro figures tell you the weather. To act, you need names. ShipScout sits on 11B+ shipment records across 240+ countries, and we help exporters find buyers abroad, grow exports, and make data-backed decisions — without guessing. A few concrete plays for this sector:

• Find buyers by HS code. Pull every importer of cut & polished diamonds (7102.39), gold jewellery (7113), or pearls (7101) in a target market, straight from the company database.
• Rank importers by volume. Sort the buyer list by shipment count and value so you call the firm placing 200 orders a year before the one placing two.
• Vet suppliers and partners. Check a Dubai gold counterparty's actual trade history before you ship — see who they import from and how consistently. Start with UAE-based traders.
• Track competitors. Watch which buyers your rivals are shipping to, and where a fading natural-diamond account is being replaced by lab-grown demand.

The buyers exist — in the US, the UAE, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Antwerp. The exporters who reach them first are the ones working from a list, not a hunch.