Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council: Gems, jewellery exports spurt by 92.37 pc to Rs 20,851 crore in June, Retail News, ET Retail

Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council: Gems, jewellery exports spurt by 92.37 pc to Rs 20,851 crore in June, Retail News, ET Retail

India’s overall gems and jewellery exports surged by 92.37 per cent in June to Rs 20,851.28 crore (USD 2,863.76 million) compared to the same month of 2020, the Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council GJEPC ) said on Wednesday. The gross export in June 2020 stood at Rs 10,838.93 crore (USD 1,430.68), according to data given by GJEPC.The overall gross export of cut and polished diamonds went up by 113.25 per cent in June to Rs 14,512.11 crore (USD 2000.48 million) compared to Rs 6,805.25 crore (USD 898.30 million) in the corresponding month last year.The total export of gold jewellery surged by 398.70 per cent Rs 4,185.10 crore (USD 570.05 million) in June compared to Rs 839.21 crore (USD 110.79 million) in June 2020.Meanwhile, the overall gems and jewellery exports witnessed 254.75 per cent growth during the April-June quarter of this financial year at Rs 67,265.66 crore (USD 9,182.38 million) as compared to Rs 18,961.63 crore (USD 2,504.58 million) in the same quarter of FY21.“Growth in exports is mainly due to the revived import demand in the leading export market of USA and the fulfilment of orders received by numerous Indian exhibitors during the Virtual Buyer-Seller Meets (VBSMs) conducted by the Council,” GJEPC chairman Colin Shah said.Revival of demand for studded jewellery products and re-stocking the inventory levels majorly attributed to the swift recovery of exports of cut and polished diamonds as well as studded jewellery, Shah added.

WEDDING BOOM: Couples hot to marry after pandemic — study

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Article content Weddings can survive just about everything, but a global pandemic is a whole different story.

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Article content Like many of us, wedding planner Jodi Gagne didn’t think the pandemic was going to last. But by the first week of April 2020, she quickly realized things weren’t going to be improving anytime soon. We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or WEDDING BOOM: Couples hot to marry after pandemic — study Back to video “The cancellations started coming in, the postponements, and I was soon telling my couples that 2020 is a write-off,” the owner of Simply Perfect, a wedding planning company, told the Toronto Sun. “It wasn’t until August that I started to get asks for 2021.” But then Ontario went into more lockdowns, and businesses were impacted once again. In fact, Gagne has only done one 2021 wedding, so far — and it was for 10 people. Next year, however, is promising to be full of flashy weddings. Signet, the parent company of Peoples Jewellers, conducted a recent study with 327 people that looked at the impact of COVID-19 on people in serious relationships.

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Article content Based on the findings, Canada’s largest jewelry retailer predicts a wedding boom in 2022. Half of the engaged couples (51%) said the pandemic had a positive impact on their relationship and found that 71% reported moving their relationship to the next level — whether by getting engaged or moving in together. Once date nights out and travelling were put on hold, engaged couples spent more quality time together hanging out in their cozy little bubbles, watching movies, and ordering takeout. As for the non-engaged couples, more than half have moved their relationship “to the next level” during the pandemic, with nearly one-third saying COVID expedited the progression of their relationships. According to the study, many couples in relationships are specifically waiting for the pandemic to end before getting married, mainly because of concern over the health and safety of their guests. Of those that are waiting, 72% plan to tie the knot within six months of getting the all-clear.

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tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or But that’s the thing. No one really knows when things are going to get back to what they were before the pandemic. “For those who have very minimal amounts of money invested in a wedding — if any at all — I think that gives them the flexibility to say, ‘Let’s just get married,’” says Gagne. “In terms of the commitment part of it, people are definitely recognizing what weddings are really about, and stripping away all of the extra stuff that a wedding represents in terms of social standards.” Compared to this year and last, there will definitely be more weddings in 2022, but Gagne believes they will likely be on a smaller, more intimate scale. So think more of a wedding whisper. On the other hand, 2023 is where that boom gets loud.

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Article content By 2023, people are going to have missed so many milestones with families and friends that they just want to have a big freakin’ party,” says Gagne. “But the purpose of that party is to reunite, so think of 2023 as more of a reunion.” More On This Topic I do? Oh no, you don’t! Ontario wedding industry hoping for a compromise Wedding industry lost $780 million due to pandemic: Report And this pandemic is the wake-up call weddings needed. “It needed a little shakeup, to realign and get us to focus on what’s really important: that connection,” says Gagne. “A reunion of loved ones coming back together to celebrate, I don’t think it’s going to be so much about the things as much as it is about the people.”

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Can Reddit’s silver “apes” beat the market?

LONDON, July 9 (Reuters) - (The seventh paragraph contains language that may offend some readers)

Kerry Kraker, 56, has worked in kitchens all his life. Since March he’s spent around $100 a week - half his spare cash – on silver coins. He’s part of a growing social media movement who say they are buying bars and coins for protection from a coming age of inflation.

Thanks to a community of like-minded silver ‘stackers’ gathering on social-media platform Reddit Inc., Seattle-based Kraker says he also feels empowered.

“They are so encouraging and so convinced in the changes they can cause,” Kraker, who lost his home in the financial crisis, told Reuters.

Inspired by Reddit forum WallStreetBets, some of the 122,000-strong community hope to corner the market and bring down what they say is an unjust banking system.

Market professionals say that is unlikely to succeed - there is plenty of silver, and central bankers in the United States and Europe expect inflation to stay in low single-digits.

But bankers aren’t getting through to this group.

“There’s a bit of anger, like ‘fuck the system.’ If there’s a back door to wealth, I might take that door because the front door is closed,” said Kraker. “The bankers and others have basically shut that door for everyone who is not themselves.”

The core of the movement is a Reddit community called Wall Street Silver, formed in January at the time WallStreetBets was marshalling an uprising of ordinary people against the financial elites, through coordinated buying of company shares.

Reuters spoke to more than 20 members, who call themselves “silverbacks” and “apes,” have a home page featuring an image of an army of primates on the march from the “Planet of the Apes” movie, and say things like “Ape like shiny.” They organise “raids” – days on which everyone buys together.

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The group’s founder, Ivan Bayoukhi, is a 24-year old former car salesman living with his parents in Alberta, Canada. “NOW IS THE TIME TO WAKE UP AND TAKE THE POWER BACK IN THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLE,” says one of his characteristic posts.

Silver costs around $26 an ounce. Stackers think the price will rise as inflation erodes the value of currencies, demand for silver rises, and supplies run short. Some say that by buying up bars and coins, they can jack up prices by 100% or even 1,000%, to the point where they can call the shots against the so-called bullion banks, the large financial institutions which lead trade in precious metals.

A March post pictured silver coins laid out to spell a message to the head of JPMorgan Chase & Co, a U.S. investment bank which dominates the bullion trade: “KISS MY ASS JAMIE DIMON.” JPMorgan (JPM.N) declined to comment.

“In a year or two we will have millions of people in the movement,” Bayoukhi told Reuters. “And then it will be over for the bullion banks.”

“CORNER THE MARKET”

Prices of silver and gold, which are traditionally seen as safe stores of wealth, have risen since 2019: Gold is up around 40% and silver around 70% since then. The silver stackers are joining millions worldwide who believe currencies are vulnerable – a fear that has grown as governments borrowed and printed money in the pandemic.

“It scares me every day when this bomb will burst,” said Tim Hack, a 23-year-old stacker in Germany. “Silver and gold really have intrinsic physical value that you can even feel when you hold it in your hand.”

Posters on Reddit joined the silver fray on Jan. 27, when posts appeared on WallStreetBets saying that if enough people bought the metal, they could push prices to the moon.

“Corner the market,” said one.

Adding to the impetus was an argument put forward on Reddit that big banks trade huge quantities of paper contracts for silver that they don’t have in their possession, keeping prices lower than they should be.

In some ways, that’s correct.

Contracts representing around 800 million ounces of silver are active in the New York futures market alone - more than twice the amount the exchange says is in its registered vaults, not all of which is available for delivery. Much of the silver that banks buy and sell in London, another big trading hub, is borrowed, bankers and traders say.

1/9 Silver investor Kerry Kraker displays a silver figure nicknamed “Troy” by the “Wall Street Silver” Reddit community as he poses for a photograph at his home in Seattle, Washington, U.S., June 12, 2021. Picture taken June 12, 2021. REUTERS/Lindsey Wasson Read More

If every professional who owns silver on paper called in their dues at once, there wouldn’t be enough metal on hand, they agree. The system works because most people with contracts don’t want actual metal, which they’d have to pay to store and insure. They are speculators, or miners and jewellers, hedging their risks.

After the posts on WallStreetBets, around $3 billion rushed into a fund run by asset managers Blackrock (BLK.N) that stores silver for investors. Blackrock said it added more than 100 million (adds dropped word) ounces of silver to its stockpile in three days. Silver’s wholesale price jumped nearly 20%.

Much of the silver stored for Blackrock is in London. The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), an industry body, later said that there had been “concerns that London would run out of silver.”

Blackrock told Reuters it did not track where the money had come from.

The Reddit group’s founder Bayoukhi said he watched with growing excitement, turned to his father and said, “Why don’t I start a Wall Street silver community?”

“FAMILY FOREVER”

There’s also truth in Redditors' claims that big players can influence the silver market. One trader tactic is spoofing - sending out fake buy or sell orders to shift prices before completing the real trade.

In 2020, JPMorgan paid $920 million to U.S. authorities to settle charges that its staff sent “hundreds of thousands” of fake orders into precious metals and Treasury markets. The bank said at the time that the people responsible had left and it had improved its compliance systems. It declined further comment for this story.

But the impact of spoofing lasts only seconds or minutes, said Ross Norman, a London-based former precious metals trader.

The January squeeze lasted three days. Then WallStreetBets returned its focus to stock markets; silver calmed. Since early February, the price of silver has fallen by a dollar.

Undeterred, Wall Street Silver issues a deluge of tips, analysis, memes, photos and encouragement. It is only Reddit’s 3,783rd biggest community, but it is frequently in the top 20 for volume of posts per day.

When a new member posts, Bayoukhi often responds saying, “You are now family forever.”

“HELL OF A TIME”

Reddit buyers sit at the end of a fat silver pipeline. Only about a quarter of the 1 billion ounces or so that are produced each year is used to manufacture the bars and coins that most of them are buying, analysts say. Most of the rest is used for jewellery and in industrial applications.

Michael Mesaric, who runs the world’s largest gold and silver refiner - Valcambi SA, in Switzerland - says the 1,000 ounce bars of silver used in the wholesale market are plentiful: For small investors to think they can corner the market is “entirely wrong.”

“They can engineer a squeeze on products,” he said. “But silver in total? They’ll have a hell of a time.”

Investors will stockpile a lot of silver this year, but less than in 2020, according to consultants Metals Focus. Demand in the West is strong, but in India, one of the biggest silver consuming countries, the pandemic is reducing people’s ability to buy, they say.

Funds like Blackrock’s stockpiled 331 million ounces - the most ever - in 2020, Metals Focus said in a report for the Silver Institute; bar and coin buyers took home 200 million ounces more. This year, the consultancy expects funds to hoard 150 million ounces - the second highest level ever - and bar and coin buyers 253 million ounces.

Silver coins and bars can certainly hold their value. Higher inflation should lift prices, as will rising demand from makers of goods like electronics and solar panels, said Rhona O’Connell, an analyst at traders and brokers StoneX.

But she, and others at companies that trade the metal, think predictions of $1,000 an ounce are out of this world.

Of 39 analysts and traders polled by Reuters in April, only seven thought silver prices would average $30 or more in 2022. The highest average that they forecast was $44.

Redditors are unmoved. Kraker, the restaurant worker, has begun reading obsessively about inflation, money supply and other economic data. “There is a monster around the corner,” he said. “I’m trying to sharpen my stick.”

(This story was corrected to add the dropped word ‘million’ in section 2)

Peter Hobson reported from London; Edited by Veronica Brown and Sara Ledwith

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