Wen / Lu Yanzhen Shanghai Diamond Exchange
The 2026 Lunar New Year Golden Week (including Valentine’s Day), as the annual “touchstone” of Chinese jewelry retail, has handed over a complex and profound market answer sheet.According to the latest data from the Shanghai Gold Jewelry Industry Association, the sales of the Shanghai gold jewelry market during the Spring Festival reached 720 million yuan, an increase of 5% year-on-year; at the national level, the average daily sales growth rate reached 8.6% year-on-year, far exceeding the growth rate of 4.1% during the Spring Festival in 2025.
Through these data, we can clearly observe: in the context of the high volatility of gold prices (domestic pure gold jewelry prices exceeded 800 yuan/gram), China’s jewelry consumption is experiencing structural differentiation-gold consumption is showing a trend of “investment”, while natural diamond inlaid products have achieved significant growth against the trend, showing the return of scarcity value. Power.
“Volume and price divergence” and demand overflow in the gold market
In the Spring Festival of 2026, the gold market will show obvious ”volume and price divergence” characteristics.
- On the one hand, high gold prices have suppressed the consumption of large-gram heavy gold jewelry: data from the China Gold Association show that although the overall consumption of gold has increased, the volume of traditional wedding “three gold” jewelry such as gold bracelets and gold necklaces has declined significantly.；
- On the other hand, diamond-inlaid gold jewelry has achieved significant growth: the Shanghai Gold Jewelry Industry Association specifically pointed out that some brands have taken the initiative to increase the promotion of diamond and gold diamond-inlaid products. With stable prices and novel style designs, such products have achieved significant sales growth during the Spring Festival.
This trend reveals a key signal: when the attributes of gold as an investment product are strengthened by high gold prices, part of its attributes as an ornament spill over to the field of diamond setting. In addition to the gold investment logic of “buying up or not buying down”, consumers still pursue jewelry with aesthetic value and emotional attributes, and natural diamond inlaid products just fill this gap in demand.
Natural diamonds: the Return of rationality and the anchoring of scarce attributes
Compared with the hustle and bustle of the gold market, the natural diamond market will show a more rational return to value in the opening year of 2026.Although De Beers will significantly reduce its value and lay off workers due to unsalable small particles in 2025, the price of large-grain rough diamonds of 5 carats and above will be increased by 2%-10% at the inspection meeting in February 2026, confirming the market reality of the shortage of large-grain natural diamonds.This structural differentiation of “the bigger, the more expensive, the smaller, the harder it is to sell” precisely proves the scarcity of natural diamonds as a non-renewable resource.
The market performance during the Spring Festival further supports this trend：
- Chow Tai Fook: Data for the third quarter of fiscal year 2026 show that same-store sales in mainland direct stores increased by 21.4%, franchise stores increased by 26.3%, and the Hong Kong and Macao market increased by 14.3%.Among them, the penetration rate of diamond inlaid products in the wedding and gift market has steadily increased.
- Laopu Gold: Recorded high double-digit or even triple-digit sales growth during New Year’s Day and the Spring Festival, and its high-end product line of ancient gold inlaid with diamonds has become a popular category for queuing up.
This ”high-end and inlaid” consumption tendency shows that China’s high-net-worth people are re-recognizing the scarcity value and value-preserving attributes of natural diamonds.Unlike the “gram denomination” of gold, the “4C standard” and non-renewable attributes of natural diamonds make them uniquely resistant to risk under inflation expectations.
Cultivating diamonds: the stabilization of the price war and the transformation of the “Scientific and technological hardcore” on the industrial side
At the same time, the Chinese diamond market will continue the fierce price war in the Spring Festival of 2026.According to monitoring by CCTV Finance and Surging News, the price of 1 carat cultivated diamond loose diamond during the Spring Festival has fallen to the range of 1,000-3,500 yuan, which is only 1/20 to 1/10 of the natural diamond of the same size (40,000-80,000 yuan).
- Price trend: In 2025, the wholesale price of cultivated diamonds will fall by an average of 26%, touching the cost line of some manufacturers, resulting in the clearance of backward production capacity.The decline narrowed to 4.7% in the fourth quarter of 2025, indicating that the market is gradually stabilizing.
- Hierarchical competition: Cultivated diamonds use their price advantage to occupy a share in the sinking market and young consumer groups, but they also expose their shortcomings in value preservation and emotional narrative.
However, the cultivation of diamonds is ushering in an outbreak in the industrial field.The Yellow River Whirlwind 8-inch diamond heat sink was officially mass-produced in February 2026 and verified by Huawei. Akash Systems delivered the world’s first batch of Nvidia H200 servers equipped with diamond heat dissipation.Zhongyuan Securities estimates that if the AI chip market size reaches 3 trillion yuan in 2030, the penetration rate of cooling solutions will reach 5%-50%, and the corresponding market space will reach 7.5 billion to 150 billion yuan.
Summary: Towards a new era of professional division of labor
This data reveals a key trend: gold, natural diamonds and cultivated diamonds are moving from a simple “alternative relationship” to a “hierarchical competition” pattern.
- Gold: consumption and investment, decorative demand spillover.
- Natural diamonds: relying on scarcity to cling to the high-end wedding and collection market.
- Cultivating diamonds: expand the right to speak on the consumer side, and cut into the 100 billion market for AI chip cooling on the industrial side.
This is not a zero-sum game, but a natural stratification of industrial value.The Henan factory can mass-produce heat sinks, but it cannot replicate the hundreds of millions of years of geological memory carried by the large-particle blanks of Congo taken in Antwerp.
The market data for the Spring Festival of 2026 reminds us that the maturity of the diamond industry lies not in the mutual substitution of the two routes, but in the establishment of irreplaceable value coordinates in each applicable field.The fireworks of the Spring Festival will dissipate, and the rationality of the market is returning.The high gold price environment has objectively accelerated consumers’ examination of “value attributes”.In 2026, let us use data as the confidence to witness the diamond industry move from a single price war to a new era of professional division of labor and value differentiation.