Jewelry Import in Albania Increased by 200% during 2021
Possession of valuable jewelry has taken on unusual proportions, as the tendency to purchase them has increased significantly in relation to other groups of goods and services.
Official data on foreign trade show that during the first 6 months of this year, imports of natural pearls, precious stones, jewelry and coins experienced an annual increase of almost 200 percent in value.
According to INSTAT data, during this period, ALL 1.4 billion worth of jewelry were imported with an increase of 195 percent compared to the first 6 months of 2020 and 124% compared to the normal year 2019.
Leading market players have claimed that pandemic crises and crises in general increase the interest of some people to invest part of their savings in valuables. Fear of a possible devaluation of cash shifts the interest to invest savings invaluable items such as expensive jewelry, which resist economic crises without losing value over time.
But the pandemic crisis, which was unusual in nature, due to the blocking measures in motion prompted people’s desire to consider owning precious jewels as an anti-stress tool during the pandemic.
The main market players claimed that after a step in the first half of 2020 when the pandemic started, imports of stones, pearls and precious metals increased in the second half of 2020, a trend that was strongly emphasized during this year.
Precious jewelry businesses claimed that for a year, the metals and precious stones industry has experienced a strong increase, in value also from the rising price of gold especially during the peak of the pandemic.
In international markets, an oz of gold (28.5 gr) peaked during August 2020 capturing the value of 2029 dollars from 1461 dollars that were in November 2019. In the second year of the pandemic gold prices stabilized somewhat, but they remain higher than before the pandemic at a level of $ 1763 per oz these days.
In 2020, the global luxury jewelry market reached about 18 billion euros. The bulk of the market revenue is attributed to China, followed by the United States, Japan and India. The market value of jewelry is expected to increase from about $ 230 billion in 2020 to about $ 292 billion in 2025. One of the innovations in the jewelry industry is laboratory-created diamonds, which are often indistinguishable from natural diamonds, and are expected to become much more common and available in the near future.
Demand for gold worldwide has increased from over 3.1 thousand metric tons in 2007 to about 4.4 thousand metric tons in 2019. There are several different industries that use gold, but the largest of them is the jewelry industry. In 2019, the jewelry industry used over 2.2 thousand tons of gold, accounting for just over half of all world gold demand.
(Source: Monitor)