Turnout was high at the IIJS Signature, the first jewelry trade show of 2025, which focused mainly on the domestic jewelry, diamond and gemstone markets.
Sentiment was upbeat among suppliers of 22-karat gold jewelry at the January 4 to 8 trade show, but polished-diamond manufacturers were more cautious.
“While diamond crafters lost revenue, the strength of the domestic Indian diamond-jewelry market has supported the bottom line of their diamond sales,” said Rajendra Jain, head of Svar Media and former managing director of Swarovski India, who closely tracks diamond markets.
Meanwhile, Indian jewelers who attended the event, which takes place at Mumbai’s Jio World Convention Centre and Nesco, predicted a successful wedding season in 2025, at least as strong as 2024’s.
“The wedding season will be more or less similar — or a little bit more, but not less — in 2025 versus 2024,” outgoing Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC) chair Vipul Shah told Rapaport News. “The mood is robust.”
Indian wedding jewelry is overwhelmingly gold, sometimes featuring an infusion of smaller white diamonds, typically below 1 carat, with high color and clarity.
Surging gold prices, coupled with geopolitical uncertainty and falling US interest rates, have not impacted wedding-season demand, jewelers said, with many consumers seeing the yellow metal as a store of value.
A buoyant domestic Indian diamond jewelry market is likely to help offset Surat-based diamond manufacturers’ losses as prices of both natural and lab-grown diamonds fall, jewelers said.
With the “kamurta,” an inauspicious period for weddings, set to end in mid-January, the domestic jewelry market is expected to remain strong well into 2025 and underpin the coming wedding seasons, GJEPC officials said. The domestic Indian jewelry market is currently worth around $85 billion annually, around a 10th of which comes from diamond jewelry, they added.
Wedding-season demand accounts for a huge slice of the domestic Indian jewelry market, which is the second largest in the world after the United States.
Jewelers reported a growing appetite for color in Indian wedding fashion, with increasing use of colored gemstones and lab-grown colored diamonds set in 22-karat yellow gold.
As for other regions, diamond jewelers foresaw subdued demand during the Chinese New Year due to sluggish market conditions, but they were more optimistic about US Valentine’s Day offtake because of the resilience of the world’s largest economy.
“The Chinese economy still appears slow, so we are not optimistic about Chinese New Year demand,” Dhyey Sojitra of diamond and jewelry supplier Mani Export observed at the Jio World Centre. “Valentine’s Day in the US will be much more promising.”
Indian consumers were generally unconcerned over the origin of diamonds in jewelry, against the backdrop of war in Ukraine, as many were unaware that Russia was a major producer of mined diamonds, jewelers said.
Image: The opening ceremony at IIJS Signature. (David Brough)
