Buy Replica Van Cleef & Arpels - Luxury Jewellery to Market

It is a highly fragmented industry geographically. Precious metals and gems are extracted, processed, and traded at multiple sites by millions of artisanal workers. The industry is poorly regulated and highly artisanal in nature.

The key takeaways

Luxurious jewellery uses many different types of precious metals and gems, making the sector highly fragmented.

Materials used include gold, silver, platinum, diamonds, and coloured gems.

While economic downturns affect sales of buy replica van cleef & arpels - slow Chinese growth for example recently dented demand for diamonds - gold and silver bullion remain safe havens for wealth.

Both large-scale corporations and small-scale artisanal operations extract raw materials, with the latter contributing a surprising amount to global supply.

The number of people who extract and process precious metals and gems is unknown, but there could be more than 170 million workers, mainly in low-income countries.

The production of luxury jewellery relies on the extraction of precious metals and gemstones from geological deposits, as opposed to fashion jewellery. Similarly to garment production, gold, silver, platinum, diamonds and other gems are processed and traded worldwide in a chain of activities.

The supply chains for luxury jewellery are highly fragmented geographically because each raw material has its own pattern of production and trade. Raw materials are often extracted and processed in one country, then traded and sold in another. All precious raw materials are subject to environmental and social problems during their supply chains.

Luxury jewellery is produced by millions of workers, but exact numbers are hard to determine, because data is patchy. These workers are involved in mining, both large and small-scale operations, as well as processing, cutting and polishing the metals and gems – often in low-cost hubs based in Asia.

Luxury jewellery's global value

Luxury jewellery is worth around $41.6 billion globally in retail value, but fashion isn't the only market for precious metals and gems. Other markets - investors, industry and technologies - compete for these raw materials as well. When economic conditions are bad, sales of luxury jewellery may decline, but investors turn to gold and silver bullion as safe havens.

Generally speaking, precious metals and gems supply chains begin with either formal or small-scale, artisanal extraction operations.

It is dominated by large global corporations that utilize sophisticated mechanized industrial techniques for resource extraction. De Beers, for example, is one of the oldest and largest rough diamond trading companies in the world1.

Small-scale artisanal gold mining

As well as non-mechanised and mechanised mining, artisanal, small-scale mining generally involves informal, sometimes part-time or self-employed workers who lack employment contracts. Small mines rely heavily on manual labour and have low investments in technology and health and safety. Child labor may sometimes be used.

Even though the artisanal sector is less structured, it contributes significantly to the supply of precious metals and gemstones for jewellery as a whole. There is an estimate that artisanal manufacturers supply up to 80% of colored gemstones (excluding jade), 20% of diamonds worldwide2, and 10% of the total global gold supply3.

The impact

Depending on the material extracted, the production and processing stages of precious metals and gems can have substantial environmental impacts. However, several problems are common to all supply chains, such as:

Slavery, forced labor, and child labor

The use of toxic chemicals that are harmful to humans

Runoff of chemicals or sludge pollutes water and land

Disturbance of land caused by mining

Money generated by armed conflicts or human rights abuses is channeled into armed conflicts or political regimes.

Luxury Jewellery is made possible by millions of miners

In sectors such as gold or gemstone mining, it is difficult to estimate the number of informal, artisanal miners because quality data is lacking.

Currently, the best estimate for the number of artisanal miners working around the world is about 25 million people – with 150 million to 170 million people directly or indirectly dependent on this sector. This number dates around 2011, and future editions of this report will look into updating these figures.

There are significantly fewer jobs in the formal sector - gold mining, for example, employs only 1 million people5. However, higher productivity and mechanization more than compensate for the lower number.

Rare indeed is gold

Every continent has gold mines, which are traded globally as commodities and used for a variety of applications, including investment, jewellery, technology, and industrial use.

Gold's enduring appeal and the industries and commerce that surround it have led to only a relatively small amount of gold ever being mined. According to the World Gold Council, all the gold ever mined would fit in just 21 metres of cube.

This amounts to only 187,200 tonnes of gold - two-thirds of which has been extracted since 1950. Gold is virtually indestructible (but can be recycled), so every bit of gold mined is still around today. Jewellery accounts for 47.6%. Around 57,000 tonnes of gold are still believed to be underground6. Get more info about high-quality luxury jewelry.

As of 2016, the global gold trade is estimated to be worth $184 billion. About three-quarters of that is newly mined gold, while the remainder is gold recycled.

The top 10 gold producers account for roughly 63% of the gold market (see Table 1). The rest is supplied by relatively smaller producers. China is the largest gold producer, followed by Australia, Russia, and the United States.

There is more than half of all gold used for jewellery, with China and India accounting for more than half of global gold demand. The increasing affluence of both these countries could increase gold demand over time, affecting exploration and supply in the long run7.