Executive overview
The jewellery & watch trade at a glance — live registry entities, official macro figures and clearly-labelled estimates.
- The #1 discretionary retail category. Watches & Jewellery takes an estimated — of all retail receipts — — of discretionary spend — #3 category overall, with the biggest weight gain of any category (+2.6 pp) in the official 2025 rebase of the Retail Sales Index.
- A major exporter of finished goods. S$— billion a year in jewellery, gemstones, silverware and timepieces (bullion excluded).
- A nation of specialist entrepreneurs. — of the active entities are sole-proprietor businesses — independent traders and artisan-entrepreneurs ( vs across all industries).
*Past SSG support was granted, then reversed, for sole proprietors & directors — explicitly excluding this large class of independent industry contributors. - A knowledge gap the framework ignores. Traders handle valuable, easily-misrepresented goods daily — yet unlike real estate there is no required certification, and the framework offers the trade zero skills.
Sub-sector breakdown
| SSIC | Trade | Group | Active entities | of which sole props |
|---|
Benchmark comparison
Sectors with framework support today, compared with the jewellery & watch trade. Official figures where published; otherwise the same derivation basis as jewellery (labelled).
Trends
Quarter-century view: how jewellery and fashion have moved within Singapore's retail economy.
Jewellery within the retail economy
Composition of Singapore retail receipts by category, 2000 → now, in % of total so price levels don't distort the story.
Trade flows — gems, jewellery & timepieces excl. bullion
Official merchandise trade in HS chapter 71 (precious stones, metals, jewellery; bullion shown separately) and chapter 91 (clocks and watches). Headline figures exclude investment-grade gold and platinum so that financial-commodity flows do not inflate the craft trade.
Additional insights
Assessment of the S$6.1B retail figure bottom-up, from company filings, outlet counts and estimates using registry data. Verified figures cite their source; estimates carry their band.
Watches account for approximately one third of receipts. Three blocks, each independently grounded:
Locally-headquartered groups and independent retailers account for an estimated 45–55% of receipts; the composition differs by segment.
Revenue by source: listed companies from audited filings; private companies from outlet count × per-outlet band; independents from registry counts.
| Company / block | Origin | Revenue S$M (band) | Outlets | Basis | Source |
|---|
A small number of chains over a long tail of single-outlet retailers.
Schematic map of branded outlet presence; the entity-registry map is at jdmis.edu.sg/maps/acra. Bubble size indicates branded outlets per district.
Geographic footprint
Active entities by constituency (GRC/SMC) of registered address. Explore the full interactive map at jdmis.edu.sg/maps/acra.
Skills framework & TSC coverage
Measured against the official SWDA Skills Framework dataset (Q3-2026: 12,007 Technical Skills & Competencies across 41 sector entries — 33 industry sectors plus 8 cross-sector skill sets, grouped into ≈27 industry frameworks)
EXAMPLES — JDMIS has 28 specialised jewellery programmes including 4× 30-hour hand-drawing specialisations, 4 CAD, 4 Metalsmithing, 4 Metal Arts, 4 Fashion Jewellery, 2 Gemmology, 2 Trend and 4 Retail. Some examples of how these fail to map:
| Course | Nearest TSC (sector) | Fit | K&A alignment |
|---|
Twenty jewellery skills drafted from SSG-approved course content, with PL1–2 entry points in every track and a stackable qualification ladder — proposed as a routine quarterly list update, not a new sector framework.
Open the skills proposal ↗SkillsFuture justification calculator
If a national upskilling framework lifts worker value-added, what does the economy gain?
Method: workforce × VA-per-worker × uplift %. VA-per-worker is benchmarked to official SingStat figures for each sub-sector; conservative uplift caps at +30%. International evidence on structured vocational upskilling commonly reports single-digit to low-double-digit productivity uplifts.
Mechanism: upskilling raises staff capability, which shows up as customer experience and design quality; this strengthens the competitiveness of local businesses against international brands; a shift in the local share of category receipts changes how much of its value-added is captured locally. Offered as an optional supplementary calculation when planning industry support, not as a forecast.
Sources & methodology
Every figure on this dashboard is traceable. Official statistics are cited; estimates are labelled with their formula.
| Metric | Value | Source |
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