Crisis Conference

It was supposed to be a showpiece event – the highlight of the Antwerp diamond community's year. Instead of hosting its annual conference, complete with keynote speakers, African royalty and a black tie gala dinner, November's Antwerp gathering turned into a crisis control meeting where industry leaders from around the world converged on Belgium to talk about the financial situation and what the community as a whole should be doing to combat it.

The Antwerp Diamond Symposium was an extraordinary general meeting held in what are becoming increasingly extraordinary financial times. After calls by industry leaders to cut back on supplies of rough diamonds, the Gem & Jewellery Promotion Council (GJEPC) went so far as to issue a call to its members urging them not to import any rough for an entire month. Statement after statement was issued begging diamantaires to act rationally to help come through this situation relatively unscathed.

Such was the need to do 'something' that more than 500 members of the international diamond community took part in the Antwerp forum, which was organized by the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC) on behalf of the world diamond industry.

The general message issued throughout the forum was that the current situation is directly related to financial liquidity in the wider economic world and not to the fundamentals of the diamond business, which is ultimately true but offers little comfort to those whose businesses have been stunted by the global slowdown.

Nevertheless, the forum at least showed that the major players at the upper end of the pipeline – notably De Beers and Alrosa – are paying heed to calls to act responsibly and not to continue flooding the market with unnecessary rough – at least in the short term. This is widely regarded as a popular move that will help to shore up prices.

Although the conference was born out of panic, or at least attempts to sooth the industry, some speakers did managed to put the situation in a more positive light. Among them was Industry analyst and event moderator Chaim Even-Zohar who crunched the numbers and gave his estimate that diamonds at the retail level will fall about 10 percent over 2009. Working backwards, he said this translates into a decrease in demand at wholesale of about 20 percent and a 35 percent fall in the amount of rough diamonds required. Speaking with the authority of years of experience, Even-Zohar said, "Let us keep things in perspective, under current circumstances a 10 percent fall in demand at retail is not the end of the world."

Nevertheless, a call for action went out at the conference to take immediate action. "“Regardless of the length of this recession, it is clear that we need to take action now, and we must do with a belief that we can succeed. After all, our industry has prospered for centuries. This by no means is the first crisis in our industry, and yet we have always endured and succeeded. This knowledge should at least provide us all here with a great degree of confidence,” said Freddy J. Hanard, CEO of the AWDC.