A large group of international diamond manufacturers and traders have issued a joint appeal to the global trade to join them in the search for an independent, transparent, innovative third party operated polished diamond trading and buying platform that will serve the global diamond and jewellery trade.
In an Open Letter issued to colleagues in the industry, the nearly 60 signatories from key centres such as Antwerp, Mumbai, Dubai, New York and Ramat Gan, said that they have made the appeal even as the pandemic caused by the Covid-19 virus has brought almost the entire world as they know it to a standstill.
They further state that the initiative was born on March 20, 2020, immediately after the Rapaport Group (RG), which operates the diamond industry’s leading polished diamond trading platform and price index system, unilaterally adjusted prices downwards for about 95 percent of the categories listed in the round and fancy polished diamond price index of March 20, with an average of five to seven percent, across the board.
The signatories said that they, along with a much larger number of other companies, came together “to voice their resistance and rejection of RG’s actions”.
The group states that one of the views shared by them and many other companies who voiced opinions against the price hike on social media was that “the RG has operated the trade’s leading price index system in a non-transparent manner and had dictated polished diamond prices, revising them upwards or downwards, without offering any guidance, let alone explaining the rationale or mechanism that lies behind its decision-making process”.
They further point out that “the current slow trade of polished diamonds is the direct result of the crippling effects of sovereign nations under total lockdown, not by supply and demand fundamentals”, and state “therefore, the latest polished diamond prices published by the RG do not reflect trading prices in the global wholesale diamond market”.
Companies who signed the Open Letter also decided “that they would use the RG’s polished diamond price index as published on March 6, 2020, as a reference point until a new, independent, non-biased and transparent alternative would be presented to the diamond industry”.
They said they have also voluntarily resolved to remove their polished diamond inventories from the platform, and are now posting their stocks on other existing platforms.
Meanwhile, the World Federation of Diamond Bourses (WFDB) has announced that a state-of-the-art, “cross-bourse” trading platform is under development (www.get-diamonds.com) and will very soon be available for the diamond industry and trade at large, the group noted.
Source: GJEPC 3-4-2020
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