Sarine Technologies, an Israeli diamond tech firm, has reported a profit of $1.1 million in 2024, a turnaround from a loss of $2.8 million a year earlier.
According to the company, the change in financial performance was attributed to broad cost-cutting measures and improvements in work processes resulting in better operating efficiency as market conditions remained difficult.
Such negative factors as the ongoing weak demand for diamonds in China and continuing disruption from lab-grown diamonds (LGD) have caused the revenue decline of 8% to $39.2 million during the reporting period. The company derives most of its revenue from diamond manufacturing activities, which took a hit from the abovementioned factors.
“The competition from LGD jewellery with its eroding prices has impacted on the prices of natural diamond jewellery, which have also fallen, but to a much lesser extent,” Sarine said in a statement.
During the year, the company continued to make good progress in executing its various new strategic initiatives by introducing its Most Valuable Plan (MVP) for optimising the planning of natural rough diamonds, adapting its rough planning technologies to LGD, and the opening of a GCAL by Sarine lab in India to service the significant Indian LGD industry. This helped Sarine to expand its services portfolio, customer base and recurring revenue streams.
Sarine expects the demand for natural diamonds to remain constrained in 2025 due to weak consumer spending in China and the ongoing impact of LGD. Due to the oversupply of LGD and the sharp fall in retail prices due to stiff competition, diamond retailers are beginning to question the longer-term economic viability of this product segment.
“It is our belief that diamond jewellery retailing will settle on a new equilibrium in the near term, with natural diamonds trending towards a significant market share especially in the bridal segment and LGD dominating the fashion jewellery segment,” the company said in a statement.
Theodor Lisovoy, Managing Editor, Rough&Polished
