Russia to Launch Online Jewelry Marketplace

The governments of Russia and Belarus plan to launch an international jewelry marketplace early next year in an effort to streamline exports, according to a media report.

The countries will carry out the project together with the Kazakhstan-headquartered Eurasian Development Bank, Russian daily newspaper Izvestia reported last week. Work began in January, with the launch scheduled for March 2024, it said.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE), Vietnam, Thailand and China are the priority countries the governments hope to target, Izvestia quoted Yulia Goncharenko, director of Russia’s department for state regulation of the precious metals and precious stones industry, as saying.

In a June statement, the Russian Ministry of Finance said it had developed a structure for such a platform. Goncharenko addressed the matter at the at the Eurasian Congress, which the Eurasian Development Bank hosted in Sochi, Russia, that month.

“Amendments to be made to the current legislation are currently being worked out,” Goncharenko said at the event, according to the Russian-language statement. “We are solving several problems at once: We are creating a tool, plus we are simplifying the system for exporting jewelry.”

The Eurasian Economic Union — comprising Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia — has approximately 6,000 jewelry factories, Goncharenko said. These units produced about $1.6 billion worth of jewelry in 2022, she added.

However, the factories are not widely represented on the world market, the official explained. The platform is a way to address that as well as to make it easier to ship to foreign countries, she noted.

The move comes amid wide-ranging Western sanctions on Russian products that have impacted the country’s exports of gold, diamonds and other valuable items.