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The fourth season of the Netflix series The Crown, the television series focusing on the lives and loves of the British royal family, has finally come around to introducing character of Lady Diana Spencer, thereafter the Princess of Wales, who on screen as she did in reality has grabbed the spotlight from all those around her.
As part of its Building Forever program, De Beers commits to continue enabling access to world-class healthcare for community members through the hospitals around its mining operations in Botswana and Namibia through 2030 and beyond. (Photo courtesy of De Beers)
A set of five rough blue diamonds has provided some welcome relief to the cash-strapped mining company Petra Diamonds, which closed out a competitive tender in which the winning bid of $40.36 million offered a partnership between De Beers and Diacore was accepted.
With the Thanksgiving weekend in the United States set to jumpstart the holiday shopping season, the diamond and jewelry sectors are beginning to consider prospects for 2021, after wrapping up what certainly for most was the most tumultuous and bizarre year in living memory.
While the core personal luxury goods market has contracted in 2020 for the first time since 2009, falling by 23 percent at current exchange rates to about $257 billion, it has been a year of profound global change in the way we live, the way we shop and what we value. These are among the findings from the 19th edition of the Bain & Company Luxury Study, released in collaboration with Fondazione Altagamma, the Italian luxury goods manufacturers’ industry foundation.
Slowly, a sense of normality appears to be returning to the diamond industry. On November 13, Dominion Diamond Mines announced that 60 of its employees would be heading back to the Ekati mine, 300 kilometers northeast of Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories, after a more than a half-year of activities being suspended at the site.
The term “phygital” has become the buzzword for the year 2020. Essentially referring to a marriage of both online and offline commercial environments, it involves a multichannel approach to creating a more complete and satisfying customer experience, where the consumer moves seamlessly between the digital and brick and mortar worlds.
Whereas 2019 and 2020 have shown themselves to a be a game changer for the entire world, the process may have been even more dramatic for the diamond industry, which after a gradual restructuring process finally saw the development of a real demand-driven business, this new environment, the perennially profit-squeezed midstream is more able to act purely in its own “economic, financial, and commercial self-interest, less burdened by producer pressures to ‘relieve” them of their stocks,” write Pranay Narvekar and Chaim-Even-Zohar in the 2020 edition of their annual diamond pipeline report, published by IDEX.
In January 2019, the emerging laboratory-grown diamond industry scored a public relations coup when the American wife of Britain’s Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, was spotted in London on her way to a meeting. She was dressed as most would expect from a member of the British family, but what caught the public’ attention were the drop earrings she was wearing. As it transpired, they were set with diamonds that were not natural, but rather had been grown in a lab. If a princess could wear lab-grown diamonds, the pundits asked, why not ordinary people?
While the future course of the laboratory-grown diamond sector is not yet certain, one organization that is not sitting on the fence is the De Beers Group. Having launched its own laboratory-grown diamond jewelry company in 2018, the company is building a factory in the U.S. State of Oregon that, when at full steam, will be able to turn out up to 500,000 carats per annum.
A decision by Alrosa, the Russian diamond mining company, to create a single production framework that encompasses all of its cutting and polishing facilities raises the prospect of vertical integration in the diamond industry, reducing the very fragmented structure of the diamond pipeline, by which diamonds pass through multiple hands on their way from the mine to the retail jeweler.
With most of the year having played out in the shadow of the COVID-19 coronavirus, with billions of people around the word living with lockdowns and social distancing, 2020 is likely to be recognized as one of the most significant watersheds in the history of mankind.
As the end of the year approaches, there are increasing signs of market recovery, partly allaying concerns that holiday season demand may not be as devastated by the COVID-19 crisis as many had feared.
On consecutive days, two of the world’s most influential gemological authorities have released information that indicates how gem labs are likely approach the controversial task of evaluating and reporting on the characteristics of individual laboratory-grown diamonds.
A private Japanese collector has handed over $15.6 million to purchase a 102.4-carat D-color flawless oval diamond during a hybrid online and live auction by Sotheby’s in Hong Kong.
While many of the Western luxury markets have been hit hard by the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, and are expected to decline between 25 percent to 45 percent in 2020 compared to the previous year, and indeed are unlikely to return to pre-coronavirus levels before 2023 or 2024, the situation is very different in China, according to a recently released report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), together with Tencent Marketing Insight.
With the COVID virus still a very salient factor in all major markets, where at the very least strict containment measures still remain force, retailers are coming to terms with the reality that they will have to approach the coming holidays season differently to how they have in years past, so as to salvage part of what clearly has been a very challenging year.
Gaetano Cavalieri, president of CIBJO, the World Jewelry Confederation, described the growing price differential between laboratory-grown and natural diamonds to be one of the most dangerous threats to consumer confidence facing the industry.
In early September, NDC announced the imminent debut of a new global advertising campaign, called “For Moments Like No Other.” Filmed in July in coastal Portugal, the campaign celebrates the many emotional connections created by diamond jewelry, something that research shows will resonate strongly as the world emerges from the current COVID crisis.
One of the lesser known facts about diamond grading was that there did not exists an internationally agreed to system by which it was carried out, nor even professional requirements for someone presenting himself or herself as a diamond grader. That was the case until September 2020, when the International Standards Organisation published ISO 24016, the first-ever standard approved by the body.
Over the past decade, as growing Chinese affluence translated into a dramatic rise in overseas travel, tourists from the country became the mainstay of the luxury goods business in a wide variety of nations, and particularly so in Europe.
History was made on the lawns of the White House in Washington, D.C., when on September 15, 2020, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed an agreement with the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, normalizing relations between the Jewish state and the two Arabian Gulf countries. Just two days later, the impact of the deal became apparent, when the Middle East’s two largest diamond bourses, the Israel Diamond Exchange and the Dubai Diamond Exchange, signed their own strategic agreement of collaboration.
A 102.39-carat D color flawless oval-cut diamond, which will go on the block in a single-lot sale at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong on October 5, is being widely being billed as having the potential to become one of the the most expensive stones ever to sell at auction.
The mega-deal of the century, which many predicted would reshape the high-end jewelry retail market, looks like it is faltering, with the luxury brand juggernaut LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE announcing on September 9 that it would be it was backing out of its $16.2 billion takeover of Tiffany & Co.
Entitled “One Lifetime, One Encounter,” referencing the closure of the iconic mine, the 2020 Argyle Pink Diamonds Tender is a collection of the rarest diamonds from a year’s production at the site in the remote east Kimberley region of Western Australia. It includes 62 diamonds with a total weight of 57.23 carats.