In the last two years CIBJO has transformed itself to become the world jewellery confederation and its importance around world today is very significant.

Here we seek governments, associations, organization as presented here to encourage and facilitate the merger of few big players in each markets to form at least - a marketing voice for jewellery and should start a plan to have bigger size companies.

This new set up should be able to compete effectively with organized retailers from other segments in luxury.

In this way we do not need hundreds of thousands of different fragmented entities with limited resources failing to protect the growth, but 50-100 new joint entities will be enough deliver and sustain the growth for the entire industry.

Let me now go back to what I have prepared originally for my speech -- keeping to my topic - The Jewellery sector challenges:

I am glad to say, our concerns expressed in earlier CIBJO meeting have been confirmed by the recent KPMG survey on the global gems and jewellery industry.

According to the survey, our industry has grown at an annual Compound Annual Growth (CAGR) rate of 5.2 percent since the year 2000.

However, this will see a massive decline to 4.6 percent during 2005-2015. Diamond jewellery industry will be even slower at a CAGR of 3.3 percent.

As a true believer in the collective efforts, I would like to present to you an action plan to overcome the expected slowdown and achieve a healthy CAGR of 6.7 percent.
First of all, let us let us examine the reasons behind this expected slowdown:

1. Lack of growth in key markets.
2. Increasing consumer sophistication and decreasing investment driven purchases.
3.Consumer consciousness about origin and source of and labour issues within the industry has had an impact on industry’s image.
4. Other lifestyle and luxury products continue to pose a serious threat to our industry as we are not changing.
5. Hesitancy to embrace technology.
6. There is much to be desired in public sector-private sector partnership which can help to capitalize on growth in other industry sectors like tourism.
7. Shortage of skilled labour and professionals.
8. Lack of modern and youth marketing.

Instead of being faced with the prospective industry slowdown- let us unite and work towards increasing our industry growth by generating an additional $50 billion which, according to the survey is very critical.

At the annual Dubai City of Gold Conference, we examined the growing spending power of the youth and called for marketing programmes specifically targeted at young adults who connect with lifestyle brands on an emotional level and use them to express their aspirations, individuality and non-conformance to tradition.

Most jewellery companies are family run businesses that might not necessarily have the resources to invest in exorbitant marketing programmes, not to mention the fact that the industry is divided in its efforts to promote various sub-sectors.

To compete in the increasingly competitive market, we need to invest in technological know how and work towards sophistication of manufacturing and retailing techniques.

Technology helps to reduce manufacturing time and cost, and makes it easier to come up with new designs to meet changing consumer demands and fashion trends.

The advent of technology has also created a new business channel – the Internet, which is increasingly favored by the younger generation and busy executives.

There are lots of ways for our industry to tap the potential of this virtual trading place and a unified marketing effort will take us there.

As an industry we should align ourselves with government initiatives to promote jewellery alongside tourism programmes, which is a high growth industry that will have a spill-over effect on our industry.

In the UAE, our association supports government driven programmes like the Dubai Shopping Festival and Dubai Summer Surprises that see a huge influx of tourists into the country.
In fact, Dubai Shopping Festival is one of the biggest shopping event for jewellery in the UAE.

During DSF 2006/07 sales touched AED1 billion, a 25 percent net increase to what was originally expected. This reflects on the popularity and success of Dubai Gold and Jewellery Group’s promotions which included a daily giveaway of 1 kg gold and special DSF diamond pendant through collective efforts of all types of jewelers.