When Dubai Diamond Week opened its second edition on 26 October, the organisers were not in a mood for pleasantries. The theme of the seventh Dubai Diamond Conference, the week’s centrepiece, read like a memo from an industry in therapy: “Diamond 2.0: A Strategic Reset – Reigniting Desire, Unlocking New Value.” Ahmed Bin Sulayem, DMCC’s executive chairman and chief executive, set the tone from the stage: the natural diamond industry is at a defining moment, he told delegates, and the pressures it faces go well beyond supply and demand.
Dubai, at least, can argue the reset is working from a position of strength. The emirate closed 2025 with a record US$41.7 billion in diamond trade across 359.5 million carats — the first time value and volume have peaked in the same year — with natural stones accounting for 95.8 per cent of trade value. UAE Minister of Economy and Tourism Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri used his keynote to declare the country’s position as a leading global diamond hub consolidated; Botswana’s minerals minister, Bogolo Joy Kenewendo, beamed in by video to agree.
The week’s showpiece was The Infinity, an 888.88-carat fancy black natural diamond presented by Diamond Trading NV and delivered under Brink’s escort. Cut between 2022 and 2024 from a 1,138-carat rough that Andrew Coxon acquired for De Beers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo back in 1975, the rough was documented by GIA in 2013 as the largest single-crystal natural diamond it had examined. The run of eights, one assumes, was no accident.
There was substance behind the spectacle. DMCC announced an education partnership that will see HRD Antwerp, Europe’s grading authority, deliver diamond grading, gemmology and jewellery design courses through the Dubai Design Academy, with graduates earning internationally recognised diplomas. Dhamani Jewels unveiled plans for the world’s first boutique dedicated to the Dubai Cut diamond. And in a move this magazine can only applaud, DMCC and ORIGINALLUXURY published The Swiss Parallel, a report urging the diamond trade to study how Swiss mechanical watchmaking turned obsolescence into desire — seven strategic moves covering differentiation, authentication and new investment infrastructure, including tokenisation and fractional ownership. The JGTD sourcing exhibition ran alongside at the Dubai Exhibition Centre through 29 October. The diamond world came to Dubai to talk about its future; it left having been shown one.
