Fourth Dubai City of Gold Conference Wrap Up

Billed as the “World Jewellery Meet,” the Fourth Dubai City of Gold Conference, which concluded yesterday (Tuesday), offered a mine to market snapshot into current issues in the jewelry industry.

Among the speakers at the conference, which was inaugurated by Sheik Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, President of Dubai Department of Civil Aviation and Chairman and CEO of Emirates Group, were industry experts that covered issues from gold to diamonds and marketing to innovation.

Moaz Barakat, the managing director of the World Gold Council talked about the marketing methods behind marketing gold; Chaim Even Zohar, managing director of Tacy, reported on the impact of anti-money laundering compliance programs on the international diamond and jewelry trade and industry; IDEX Online’s Ken Gassman gave a presentation on research methods for targeting customers; while CIBJO president Dr. Gaetano Cavalieri spoke about increased competition for jewelry dollars in the luxury goods market.

Blackie Marole, managing director of Debswana Diamond Company (Pty) Ltd., which is owned in equal shares by the government of Botswana and De Beers Centenary AG, told delegates of the need to maximize contributions from the country’s diamond resource to the local economy.

“An economy such as Botswana’s will always face an imbalance in that, for all its wealth-creating potential, the mining industry is inherently a capital intensive business providing relatively few employment opportunities. It is the manufacturing end of the diamond business which provides the bulk of the industry’s global employment, and productive employment opportunities are almost more valuable to us than the diamonds themselves,” he said.

Botswana is the world’s largest rough diamond producer by value and the world’s most diamond-dependent economy. As such, Marole explained the case for establishing a vertically integrated industry in Botswana which will cover the spectrum from mining to manufacturing.

“There is now a compelling commercial case for completing the final sorting and presentation sorting of Botswana diamonds in Botswana, instead of carrying out those procedures at much higher cost elsewhere. Similarly, with the centre of gravity of world production shifting towards Botswana, it now makes sense to bring other productions to Botswana for the process of mixing goods in preparation for sale. By a logical progression, the industry can now obtain efficiency gains from selling to clients in Botswana and then, at the next stage, by those clients establishing cutting factories in Botswana.”

Marole said that both De Beers and the Botswana government have accepted the logic that more value-adding processing of Botswana’s diamonds can and should be done locally in a fully competitive environment.

Tom Moses, senior VP GIA Laboratory and Research, told delegates that, “developing technologies in both diamond treatment and synthesis have created new challenges for the gem and jewelry industry.” He added, “The evolving technology with synthetic diamonds also continues to bring more products to the market.”

Among the smorgasbord of sessions presented at the conference were less well-known issues including a talk by Dr Howard Reed, the director of the Dubai Women’s College, Higher College of Technology. Reed talked about his school’s jewelry program, which is helping Dubai’s women to enter the region’s flourishing jewelry sector, while Nigel Desebrock, managing director Grendon International Research, who spoke about the jewelry potential of Iran, which he termed “a major gold market in hiding.”