Indian Jewelry Manufacturers, European Retailers Wrap Up Successful Meet

(IDEX Online News) - The Indo-Europe Jewellery Summit, an initiative that brought together a group of European jewelry retailers and wholesalers with a group of Indian manufacturers, wrapped up today in Mumbai.

Organized by the Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC), the initiative is part of a continuing effort to help the Indian gem and jewellery export production industry successfully penetrate markets around the world. There have been similar GJEPC-organised buyer-seller meets for the US, Russian and CIS markets, while Indian manufacturers have travelled to China to conduct similar meets there. This is the third Indo-Europe initiative.

GJEPC Vice Chairman Sanjay Kothari said that a measure of the success of these initiatives was the repeated participation of Indian manufacturers. “Participation is an expensive affair,” he observed, “the Indian manufacturers bear the travel and stay costs for the retailers and that many of them repeatedly do so testifies that the initiative is indeed bearing fruit.”

The format of the initiative gave all the participants one meeting with each other where both sides got to know each other and the retailers got to see what sort of product was on offer. The retailers were then allowed to specify which manufacturers interested them and factory visits to each of the selected firms was then arranged.

Andrea Seng, product manager for the Home Shopping Europe (HSE 24) television retail network, said that though the network had bought colored gemstones and some jewelry from Jaipur before, it had never before come to India to source the product. She stated that the network was willing to participate in future such initiatives and willing to come back to India by themselves to source product.

Priyanshu Shah of Asian Star Jewellery, one of the participating firms, said that this was the third such event his firm had participated in and that they were able to work with six new retailers from Europe this time. This, he observed, was remarkable because Asian Star was a regular participant in all the major global trade shows and had client outreach efforts of its own and had yet not connected with these six clients before.

Filip Van Laere, CEO of Diamond Dreams@Work, the GJEPC’s  European organiser for the initiative, observed that the three Indo-Europe initiatives had connected Indian manufacturers and retailers from 10 European countries so far. The retailers tapped represented a potential of some €2 billion and represented 4,000 points of sale. Despite its economic woes, he observed, Europe represented a market where the per capita income was $40,000, which represented considerable purchasing power.