ALROSA, very hard-pressed last summer, is recovering: its credit ratings are restored, the company is re-structuring its debt and there is open talk about turning it public.

Everything would go well if the current world crisis were just a prosy business cycle, despite of its bad after-effects. However, its worst result for the global diamond industry may lay in a fundamental change of people's attitude towards diamonds.

For quite some time now the acronym of Chindia has been used to name the new economic system - a combination of quickly growing economies of China and India which attract basic hopes in overcoming the global economic crisis.

The past Christmas sales season proved a certain recovery of the jewelry market in comparison with the fizzling year of 2008. Do the modest successes of jewelry retailers and impressing achievements of diamond miners reflect a steady recovery trend for these markets or are they only a sign of respite before a new and long nosedive?

ComScore Inc. reports that jewelry and watches ranked as the top-performing online retail category for the 2009 holiday season, besting other categories - including electronics, which typically represents one of jewelry's stiffest competitors.

Frank Fensie, owner of diamond manufacturing firm Natisa Bvba, and chairman of the BVGD – the Professional Association of Polished Diamond Dealers, who run the workshop panel on polished diamonds at the Antwerp Diamond Symposium staged by the Antwerp World Diamond Centre last November, gives his views on the state of the market at www.antwerpfacetsonline.be.

Since it can safely be assumed that a large proportion of the gold being recycled comes from diamond-set jewellery, diamonds are also involved and not just gold. There are potentially significant implications for the diamond trade.

Most U.S. jewelers posted better-than-expected sales for the 2009 November-December holiday selling period. Despite dim prospects early in the season, consumers flocked to the malls in the final two weeks prior to Christmas, as well as the week after Christmas, and went on a spending spree with the zest and energy reminiscent of some of the pre-recession periods of 2006 and 2007.

Valery Radashevich, General Director of the Guild of Russian Jewelers, in his interview to the Rossiyskaya Business-Gazeta told about Russian jewelers’ present-day concerns.

This small, speculative, globally listed sector continues to attract specialist interest as it returns from clinical death. According to http://mineweb.com, measured from July 2008, listed diamond stocks have attracted the strongest net inflows of any mining subsector, which may sound like a grand story. This is a lesser story than it appears to be.