While the latest financial results of LVMH (watches and jewelry sales +3%), Richemont (jewelry +24%) and Kering (jewelry +106%) once more highlight jewelry’s brilliant performance in the first half of the year, the diamond business fails to shine as brightly.
On July 7, Bloomberg reported that De Beers Group cut the price of its rough diamonds and reduced its number of sight-holders (the wholesale clients invited to buy its goods) by about a third to approximately 45-50.
Then, on July 13, De Beers Group announced a pause in production at its Venetia mine in South Africa, citing cost reductions and a redirection of funds on its underground project. Two weeks later, the diamond giant reported a 32% drop in average diamond carat cost to $105, down from $155 last year — even lower than in June 2020, when it stood at $119.
All of this movement follows a deal De Beers signed in February committing more of the diamonds mined in Botswana to the state-owned Okavango Diamond Company, which will sell the diamonds independently, lessening De Beers’s supply. Anglo American, De Beers’s parent company, put the company up for sale in 2024.
In an official note accompanying the pausing of the Venetia mine, De Beers acknowledged the challenging conditions in trading rough diamonds. As for the sight-holders cuts, a De Beers spokesperson linked it to “lower anticipated availability” and a “focus on deeper, more strategic partnerships”, adding that “in the new contract period, we will work with a more focused group of clients”. De Beers did not comment on the price cuts.
De Beers ‘Desert Diamond’ campaign.
Photo: Courtesy of De Beers
De Beers Group accounts for about 30% of global diamond output and is considered the industry’s bellwether. Across the category, simultaneous pressures of rising operating costs and weakened demand following the post-Covid boom has strained the structural foundations. Inflation and tensions in the Middle East made mining diamonds more expensive and led consumers in much of the Western world to cut discretionary spending. Sanctions on Russia-owned diamond miner Alrosa, which also accounts for about 30% of the market, have rocked the prices of rough diamonds.
According to the figures provided by the Kimberley Process (the global certification scheme for mined diamonds), global diamond production has contracted by a fifth, down from approximately 125 million carats in 2014 to about 99 million in 2025.
Meanwhile, the growth of laboratory-grown diamonds has dealt another blow. “The lab-grown diamond threat is very serious,” says Bernstein luxury goods analyst Luca Solca. A study by bridal platform The Knot, published in February 2026, shows that 61% of 10,000 US couples surveyed opted for lab-grown, a 239% increase since 2020. In an interview with the Financial Times on August 4, Duncan Wanblad, the CEO of Anglo American, which owns 85% of De Beers Group, acknowledged that the lab-grown diamond threat has been underestimated.
