Advantage and Hidden Danger of Chinese Jewelry Export
2008-08-26

                                                       Advantage and Hidden Danger of Chinese Jewelry Export       China draws worldwide attention in 2008, “China style” seems to be the rage in the internal jewelry industry; “China elements” is the favorite of internal jewelry designer. But nowadays, “China style” is also to be the rage on the overseas jewelry stage. Many worlds’ top jewelry brands have pushed out products that contain "China elements" to express good wishes and respect to China. These actions also show determination that they want to enter the China market.       Face to the great pressure from foreign competition, we must clearly understand our advantage and hidden danger, only realize the situation we could promote the jewelry industry developed by leaps and bounds. This article will analyze the two facets       1. Advantage       1). Industrial cluster effect beginning to show. After reform and opening up for 20 years, China's jewelry industry has been great development for the condition of market economy, making use of the advantages of geographical traditional culture, human resources, policy, etc. Now it has formed of a characteristics group of jewelry industrial base. The group contained Shenzhen, Panyu , Dongguan, Wuzhou, Changle, Zhenping, Zhuji, and so on. The city of Wuhan is also building the Chinese jewelry Expo base.      2). The jewelry export is going on increasing. For example of pearl and silver, the export tax rebate of pearl and silver declined from13% to 5% in 2007. Pearl’s export priced is 0.2645 dollars / g, higher than 2006's 0.2516 dollars / g, unit prices increased by 5.13 percent. It shows the quality of Chinese pearl is rising by step, and begins shaking off the image that occupancy the market ray on the low price.      3). Our jewelry processing industry including diamonds inlaid has a high level and ability. According to the statistics, almost 100% of the Hong Kong inlaid jewelry is processed in mainland. There is more than 200 processing plants processes jewelry for abroad for years; the annual value is more than 30 billion dollars. In addition£¬there are available more than 300 processing plants with the capacity of foreign trade processing. We can say that China has the capacity and infrastructure to be the center of world’s jewelry processing.      4). China is not only the big country for the consuming of diamond, but also is the world's most important centre of diamond processing. The Chinese processing level of diamond has been approbated and praised by the international same trade or occupation      In the eyes of businesses and consumers, “Chinese workers” is the Synonymous words of "good work" and "excellent work". Therefore, China's processing of diamonds has strong competitiveness in the world’s market. At present, China's capacity of diamonds processing is about 3 million karats annual, the amount of Practitioners is about 18,000.      5). China has unique stone caving and jading caving with rich cultural traditions. Jade produced in Myanmar, but the market is in China. In the side of Quantity, China's mainland undertake 80 percent of the raw materials processing and sales. In the other side of quality, since the Asian financial crisis, China has become the main markets of high-grade jade gradually.      2. Hidden danger      1). High volume and low worth is the bottleneck to restrict the development of jewelry industry. Nowadays, China has the international leading level of diamond cutting, mosaics, design and so on. However, gold, peals, imitation jewelry etc still has an industrial structure of high volume and low value.      Gold processing fees is only 1 to 2 Yuan/g; inlaid jewelry is generally 30 to 50 Yuan each except the high-end level. To pearl jewelry as an example, China's annual output of pearl is up to 1,500 tons, accounting for 95 percent of the world’s, but the output value is only 15 per cent of the world's total, the export earnings is not match with the output ratio.     2). The deficiency of jewelry brand is the current common problem in the industry. As the output continued to expand, the enterprises generally lack of brand awareness. At the same time, many international brands accelerate the pace of landing the mainland of China in recent years. It is bound to accelerate the re-shuffling of domestic jewelry industry, some local brands will face the fate of phasing out.      3). The intellectual property rights of Chinese jewelry processing industry is more and more concerned by international manufacturers. In the Basel jewelry exhibition 2005, an international jewelry manufacturer brought forward about 20 reports of suspected plagiarism which products are from China. Due to apply an intellectual property for a design is need 6-8 months in the country, but the popular time for jewelry is shorter than registration time, this policy restrained the popularity of the registration of intellectual property rights in the industry to some extent.      4). Chinese jewelry also has the pressure of safety and quality. Revealed by Guangdong customs, The Greek has once noticed the EU that the nickel emissions of some earrings from China is out of gauge, they need to ban the sale of related products. So the European Commission issued a consumer warning for the products in the area of EU.      China's mainland has become the world's second largest base of jewelry manufacturing, and will be the largest one in 5 to10 years. It will also become the    world's largest jewelry consumer market in 10 to 15 years.      There is no doubt that China has a bright future. But face to the strong competition pressure, we still have many insufficiencies, only ray on the tangible effort, we can realize the success.