Another Slight Fall for IDEX Polished Price Index
March 03, 24
(IDEX Online) - The IDEX Polished Price Index was down very slightly again during February, as caution persisted across all sectors of the industry. Sentiment remains weak, demand in China and elsewhere is still slow and there are fears that the new G7 sanctions on Russian diamonds will add delays and extra expense as all goods are routed through Antwerp.
The net effect, together with ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty, is that Index was down 0.30 per cent during the month. That's largely in line with fall of 0.27 per cent in January. But it would suggest that hopes of a recovery at the end of 2024 were premature. In November the Index rose - for the first time in 18 months - by 1.07 per cent, and then again in December by 1.9 per cent.
That was on the back of India's two-month voluntary ban on rough imports, an upstream squeeze, ongoing flexibility from miners and a pre-Diwali rush. There was sufficient reason to believe the long trend of decline, since March 2022, was over, that prices may have reached their low point and things were on the way up. But that optimism is evaporating. De Beers last week reported a 36 per cent drop in 2023 revenue. It does expect a return to growth, but not until 2025.
The Index hit a 20-year high in 2022, and was in long-term decline, as seen in the graph below. There was a slight bounce in November and December, but that has since flattened.
Month-to-month prices slipped during February after a 1.9 per cent rise during December and a 0.4 per cent in January. Prices fell consistently from April 2022 to October 2023.
Year-to-year prices are still showing gradual signs of recovery even though they remain negative. They were down 15.3 per cent in February after a 15.7 per cent drop in January.
Prices for most sizes of polished diamonds fell slightly during February after some increases in January. 0.5-cts goods fared best, up 1.3 per cent and 5.0-cts suffered the biggest losses, down 2.6 per cent.
Year-to-year prices were down again in February, very much mirroring what happened in January. The biggest losses were among 0.5-cts, the smallest among 5.0-cts.
Prices for most sizes shown (except 0.50-cts and 4.0-cts) decreased during February. Most prices increased slightly in January.
