Italy jewelry output, exports seen down '08
MILAN (Reuters) - Output and exports of jewelry from Italy, Europe's biggest producer, will fall this year owing to high gold prices and a weakening global economy, an industry expert said on Friday.
In 2007, foreign sales of export-focused Italian jewelry fell a greater than expected 6.2 percent by volume, while their value rose 4.1 percent, said Stefano de Pascale, director of Italian goldsmiths' body Federorafi.
In the first quarter of this year, jewelry exports from Veneto, one of the three main Italian jewelry manufacturing regions, fell 4.7 percent in value, indicating weakness across the sector, de Pascale told Reuters.
"There are reasons to consider 2008 as another year of suffering for the sector, of falls in output and exports," Stefano de Pascale, director of Italian goldsmiths' body Federorafi said in a telephone interview.
Italy, the world's biggest jewelry exporter and design leader, has seen output and export volumes fall in the past few years as India, China and Turkey have fought their way into key export markets by improving quality.
Italian jewelry export volume had been forecast to fall between 2.5 and 5.0 percent in 2007, according to different preliminary industry estimates.
"The decline that we saw in 2007 extends into the first quarter of this year," de Pascale said.
The jewelry sector was among those hit first and hardest by weakening consumer demand as global economic growth slows and fears about recession intensify, especially in the United States, the main jewelry market, he said.
Extreme volatility of gold prices on world markets this year has been "extremely penalizing" for jewelers, as buyers were reluctant to place orders in the hope that metal prices would stabilize, he said.
Gold prices spiked to a lifetime high of $1,030.80 per ounce on March 17 but have fallen about 14 percent since then, dragged by profit taking and falls in other commodities.
Jewelry output in Italy fell 5 percent to 207.9 tonnes in 2007, or less than 40 percent of the 1998 production peak, according to the latest report by metals consultancy GFMS Ltd.
(Reporting by Svetlana Kovalyova, editing by Daniel Magnowski and Peter Blackburn)
