Wholesale market outlook for 2021

Afternoon,
A question on your basic thoughts with regards to whole sale gem trade, For those working with bulk sales and those that might have some insight.

I’m wondering what your business experience has been like with current pandemic at play, with regards mainly towards the volume of sales, price point per carat, client availability and all when compared to pre pandemic times.

Finally i would love to get the opinions of anyone slightly interested in this topic on what you think the gem market will look like going forward for both wholesale and retails sales.

Thanks

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I’ve been meaning to do a sort of ‘market update’ for a while.

This is me: https://skyjems.ca/

I do both wholesale and retail, up until COVID I was about 2/3 Wholesale 1/3 Retail.

I have had to ‘pivot’ to do more retail and more custom jewellery.

It’s my opinion that the overall wholesale market will be very soft for most/all of 2021 with the exception of high quality stones.

Fine quality stones are doing well and are increasing in price at an almost alarming rate, for example, fine quality sapphire & emerald that was selling around $1500 to $2000ct USD in Sri Lanka, Colombia and India is now trading at 50%-100% more, roughly $2000-$4000

‘special colours’ of sapphires are up in value, Padparadsha, Fine Blues and Fine/Trade Ideal Teals.

The market for commercial quality merchandise is dead, the market for most semi-precious is DEAD DEAD DEAD!!! I won’t even tell you the prices I have had quartzes, topaz, Kunzite and lower/commercial quality Aqua/Tourmaline/Heliodor etc offered to me at. Basically, if it’s not worth setting in gold, it’s not selling right now.

I believe this is because people who had money to buy $20k+++ pieces still have money, but nowhere to spend it. The drop in commercial quality is almost certainly due to the massive hit that ‘the average person’ has taken.

Jewellery sales were down 57% on black friday in the USA, I’ve heard people say ‘but’ and put an asterisk beside it, but even if the true number is only a 40% decline, it’s still a MASSIVE number.

Good luck all, there is still money out there, our job is to find it!

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Thank you so much for the insight.

I really know what your talking about I’m gonna stay fire and I mostly buy find Jim’s silver and gold from private I live in Florida and let me tell you people are paying top dollar for quality stones and the middle grade stuff isn’t even moving nobody in the Jewelry Exchange has any gold in their cases except a few and take stones are not moving prices are super high