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
Penetration of synthetics and melee crisis
18 february 2019
News about the development of the industry producing synthetic rough diamonds and manufacturing synthetic polished diamonds has been dominating the stream of information for several years. But with every coming year, the danger of replacing natural stones with lab-grown goods is becoming increasingly substantive, and in 2018 this existential risk was already seriously discussed as one of the factors slowing down the demand for some part of the product range offered by diamond miners. There is no consensus on this score, but if the scenario implying further fragmentation of the diamond market and substitution of synthetics for small-size natural diamonds comes true, ALROSA may suffer the most due to a combination of reasons.
Don’t Give Up on the Diamond Industry Just Yet
11 february 2019
If diamond miner equities are a proxy, the sentiment surrounding the diamond industry is currently at historic low levels. Just in the last two years, a basket of diamond producer stocks was down 28.9% in 2018, following a decline of 17.3% in 2017 (see Figure 1 below). This is in part due to idiosyncratic operational challenges that most all of the miners are dealing with in one way or another, however, investor sentiment is also undeniably low by valuation standards projected by future diamond price expectations. This has led to concerns spanning the industry’s future growth prospects and overall longer-term economic viability.
Diamonds and secret services
04 february 2019
The image of an elegant spy as an integral feature of a diamond market has been hardwired in the brains of diamond jewellery mass-market customers after the “Diamonds are forever” novel by Ian Fleming was published in 1956. Since that time, a huge number of films and books have been created about the involvement of the intelligence services in the rough and polished diamond operations and they were rich in unbelievable story lines, as a rule, rather far from the reality. Even though the reality is more down to earth, still there are interesting details allowing make several important points on the historiography of the diamond business.
Will Zimbabwe enable ALROSA help local diamond industry sparkle?
28 january 2019
I argued in July 2013 that Zimbabwe should work with Russia’s ALROSA to find more diamond deposits not only in Marange, but across the country. This was after reports that the Russians were planning to set up ventures in Botswana and Zimbabwe. ALROSA moved with speed and established a joint venture company with Botswana Diamonds called Sunland Minerals, which operated an exploration programme on PL117 in Orapa. The JV, which sadly collapsed last year following the exit of ALROSA, carried out detailed ground geophysics programme in the area of anomaly AN117-1 to target drill sites. The Sunland JV had no instant success, but made progress toward the target of a commercial discovery.
Divination for 2019
21 january 2019
In Russia, there is a remarkable tradition, an amazing symbiosis of Orthodoxy and pagan rites. Everyone knows that Orthodox Christmas comes after the celebration of New Year’s Day, since the Orthodox Church, unlike other Christian churches, lives according to the Julian calendar. The Russian Empire lived in line with this calendar until 1917. Correspondingly, New Year’s Day itself was then celebrated starting on the night from January 13 to January 14 (according to the Gregorian calendar). Therefore, nowadays Russia has an unofficial and popular holiday with a completely unthinkable name - Old New Year. After the celebration of Orthodox Christmas and on the eve of this Old New Year in Russia, it was customary to try and guess the future. This was done in any exotic ways – everyone was doing whatever he or she could. I decided to follow this tradition on Old New Year's Eve on Monday, January 14th and see what the coming year has in store for us.
On gathering precious and semi-precious stones for mineral collections in Russia
14 january 2019
During the USSR period, trading and dealing in precious stones - both in their rough (natural) and processed (cut and polished) forms – was forbidden for the country’s citizens. They were only allowed to possess cut and polished precious stones inserted in jewellery items. In modern Russia, private market players dealing with precious stones were yet non-existent when the country started to establish gems-and-jewelry industry legislation (having adopted the Federal Law on Precious Metals and Precious Stones on March 12, 1998), except for those that used to mine and cut diamonds in the Soviet period (mined by ALROSA, cut and polished by the Smolensk Kristall factory, and some others).
How the diamond legend was created
09 january 2019
In 1973, the Memoirs by Arseniy Zverev, a prominent People's Commissar (Minister) of Finance of the USSR, who held this position from 1938 through 1960, were published. There is one interesting paragraph about diamonds in this book “One of the aspects of my activity in my new position which I have never faced before was a constant need to keep the track of events about the accumulation of state treasures. There was no information about the Diamond Fund of the USSR that is known to everyone nowadays. However, it did not remain the same but was continuously replenished. Just in 1938, when I focused on this, some diamonds were discovered for the Fund, truly speaking, these were small sized ones from the Urals. At that time, nothing was known about the famous now Yakutian diamonds.” The average weight of the diamonds mined in the Ural area when Zverev was the Minister of Finance was 0.5–0.625 carat (100–125 mg). Were they ‘small-size diamonds’? And this is about the ‘famous now Yakutian ones’ “As expected, the diamond content in the Vilyui diamondiferous alluvial deposits was higher than in the Ural fields. However, the local diamonds ranked below the Ural ones in size. The average diamond weight in the Vilyui alluvial fields was from 20 mg in the ‘Sokolinaya’ Kosa [tongue of land] up to 8-9 mg in the ‘Rybachya’ Kosa. Zverev was very well aware of the Ural diamond sizes and quality which is confirmed by his correspondence on the creation of the collection of the Geological Museum named after A. P. Karpinsky, the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.3 What led him to make such a strange ‘mistake’ in his Memoirs?
2018: The Year of the Lab-created Diamond
04 january 2019
News flow out of the diamond industry in 2018 has been dominated by the progression of lab-created diamond production, distribution and pricing dynamics. Numerous new players have entered the space, production capabilities have improved and supply has been scaled. This year alone, the price differential of a generic 1-carat lab-created diamond has fallen by almost 50% relative to the price a comparable natural diamond (the discount in late-November of 42% has risen from 29% in January). In late-May, industry bellwether De Beers1 crossed the Rubicon, announcing the company would be entering the lab-created diamond jewelry space through a subsidiary called Lightbox. The move implies a nuanced strategy with a general aim at differentiating consumer perception of lab-created and natural diamonds. In late September the product became available to consumers exclusively through the company’s website with the notable item a 1-carat solitaire pendant offered for $800 plus a nominal setting fee. At the time of launch an equivalent-quality 1-carat generic lab-created diamond was selling for around $3,700.
The use of new technologies in diamond industry
24 december 2018
New technologies in diamond mining (and in the mining industry as a whole) are mainly represented by robotics in the production process. Robotic devices based on artificial intelligence can perform a variety of tasks, including drilling and blasting, loading and transporting ore, sampling and even rescuing miners from underground workings in emergency.
What you need to know about new Zim diamond policy
17 december 2018
Zimbabwe recently announced its long-awaited new diamond policy, which limited diamond exploration and mining in the country to only four companies. The state-owned Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company (ZCDC) and Murowa Diamonds, which are currently mining diamonds in the country would be joined by two unnamed new players, to make up the four.
