Exclusive
Diamond market crash is Africa’s opportunity, not its crisis – M'zée Fula Ngenge
Global natural diamond supply is forecast to fall below 95 million carats this year, the lowest since 1987. For Dr. M'zée Fula Ngenge, chairperson of the African Diamond Council (ADC), this is not a death knell but a clarion call. In an exclusive...
Yesterday
Tracr passes 5 million rough diamonds milestone as De Beers expands provenance push
De Beers Group's blockchain-enabled traceability platform Tracr reached a significant milestone in 2025, with more than 5 million rough diamonds individually scanned and registered, up from 2.8 million cumulative registrations reported in 2024. The...
28 september 2026
South African diamonds head to Hong Kong: SDT partners with BRINKS for JGW 2026
South Africa’s State Diamond Trader (SDT) has confirmed the country's participation in Jewellery & Gem World Hong Kong (JGW) 2026 through a partnership with BRINKS. SDT marketing and communication manager Tsholofelo Gopolang Tselapedi...
14 september 2026
David Benderly: PermaScribe seeks to put trust mark on diamond table, not just girdle
In this interview with Rough & Polished’s Mathew Nyaungwa, PhotoScribe Technologies president and chief executive David Benderly explains how PermaScribe differs technically from conventional laser inscription, its potential to strengthen security, and...
31 august 2026
The great reset: Paul Zimnisky on supply catharsis, De Beers' bargain and the case for natural diamonds
The natural diamond industry is in the throes of its most profound reset in a generation. Supply is plunging to its lowest level since 1987 and De Beers—once valued at over $9 billion—is reportedly being sold for as little as $1 billion.
Lab-grown...
10 august 2026
China’s gold market development portrays solid, on-going and for the long term
31 may 2021
In one of its past studies of the Chinese gold market, the World Gold Council (WGC) talks about the formation of this market and draws a number of conclusions that are of interest today having been confirmed by the development of the gold mining industry in China.
Prospects for global diamond mining in 2021 - highly cautious optimism
24 may 2021
According to the estimates of the international consulting company Bain & Company, the world diamond production in 2020 decreased relative to 2019 by 20% to 111 mn cts1. Industry analyst Paul Zimnisky gives a similar estimate of 113 mn cts2. One question currently worries all those involved: How quickly will the diamond industry recover from the COVID-19 crisis? In February-March 2021, many diamond miners published their data on their performance in 2020 and the guidelines for 2021. Based on the data, we try to understand the current situation in the upstream, which is basic for the industry.
Pandora Brilliance: Ethics or Profit?
17 may 2021
In early May, Pandora, one of the world's top jewelry makers, while introducing Pandora Brilliance, its new lab-grown diamond jewelry collection, announced that it would no longer use natural diamonds. The move and the company's statement in which lab-grown diamonds were positioned as an ethical choice versus natural diamonds, generated a wide response in the professional community, as well as in the mass media. Calling Pandora’s narrative false and misleading, several natural diamond industry organizations asked the jeweler to correct its statement. Meanwhile, the media carried a whole gamut of comments on the subject. For its part, Rough&Polished invites readers to get acquainted with the opinions expressed by experts Sergey Goryainov and Richard Chetwode.
The diamond market to come back to normalcy
10 may 2021
The diamond market can return to normalcy after its impressive growth at the beginning of the year thanks to strong jewelry sales, rising profit margins for cutters and a shortage of rough diamonds. Midstream margins have decreased as the diamond prices continue to rise suggesting that the market is overheated. Clients become less loyal to the new price rises recalling that as the summer season approaches, the business may slow down. In addition to the seasonal lull, the downside risks in the diamond market are fueled by the data on the rise in COVID-19 infections in Europe and India.
Impact diamonds: An opportunity or a wildcat venture?
03 may 2021
Almost every year, the Russian press reports on the future development of the Popigai deposit of impact diamonds in the north of the Krasnoyarsk Territory. These “sensations” have already grown more and more detailed, including the relevant agreements between the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the leadership of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), and the Krasnoyarsk Territory, as well as attracting ALROSA and AFK (Joint-Stock Financial Company) Sistema as investors, and even positioning this project as a joint one with the Republic of Belarus. According to the Popigai diamond proponents, they promise brilliant prospects to Russia and the world, they say that the development of the deposit will provide the world industry with new rough diamonds, the annual demand for which may rise to 1 billion carats. The public interest in the issue has been mounting and it inevitably requires answers to the questions - why has a unique diamond deposit discovered half a century ago turned out to be in no demand so far and what is the real prospect of its development taking into account the current state of the world diamond market?
ICMM develops global industry standard on tailings management
26 april 2021
The publication of the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM)'s 2019 annual report last came shortly after the catastrophic collapse of a tailings dam at Vale's Córrego do Feijão mine in Brumadinho, Brazil. More than 250 people lost their lives as a result of the collapse.
De Beers - Friend or Foe?
19 april 2021
What is a natural diamond if it doesn’t have a social purpose? Let’s take the biggest brand and ask the killer question; “what, if anything, do De Beers and their ForeverMark brand really stand for?” …The answer may inspire you.
On the smuggling of rough diamonds to the USSR
12 april 2021
The opinion that the USSR was actively involved in the smuggling of industrial diamonds after World War II is quite widespread in the literature of the subject. For example, “Industrial diamonds were spirited from Zaire and Sierra-Leone to Beirut, thence by diplomatic pouch to Moscow”. Or there were reports that old traders in Beirut - where many illicit dealers in Africa shipped rough diamonds to - recalled that there were often industrial diamonds in the diplomatic pouches sent to Moscow by the Soviet Embassy in Beirut. Such information is in almost all canonical works on the diamond market history, not to mention dozens of the op-ed pieces and journalistic articles. It should be noted that the original publications on the rough diamond smuggling by the Soviets dated back to 1951-1957, and later on, they were used by market researchers and journalists as a reference base without adding any significant details. For a long time, the thesis about the rough diamond smuggling by the Soviets looked quite appropriate. However, a number of documents we discovered in the central Russian archives on the purchase of a huge amount of industrial diamonds from England in 1951-1953 (the volume of these supplies exceeded the pre-war ones by an order of magnitude) radically changed the picture.
PGI: Sentiment remains positive about precious jewellery purchasing in 2021
05 april 2021
Platinum Guild International (PGI) the worldwide marketing organisation dedicated to creating, expanding and strengthening consumer and trade markets for platinum jewellery, presents its review of Q4 2020. Since PGI was founded in 1975, platinum jewellery has contributed to over 80 million ounces of demand. PGI is headquartered in Hong Kong and has offices in China, India, Japan and the US.
Many of the proposed diamond backed Cryptocurrency schemes simply risk repeating the mistakes of history
29 march 2021
Now the diamond trade is awash with stories of new “diamond backed” crypto schemes. Maybe crypto today is what was for us the tech boom of the late 1990’s; ignore it and you miss making a fortune. But basing a crypto product on diamonds risks creating the same underlying problems we had when diamonds became The Investment of choice in the 1970s. Even if high inflation (the root cause of the move into hard assets in the 1970’s) isn’t the same threat today, using diamonds to back a crypto product has great potential to cause lasting harm to the diamond market, just as the events of the 1970s did then.
