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Since peaking in 2022, the diamond industry has been grappling with one of its most severe and prolonged crises in modern history, fueled by cooling luxury consumption in major markets and the rising popularity of lab-grown diamonds. The situation has been exacerbated by US tariff hikes on India, the world's largest diamond exporter. Over a year later, De Beers, the world's largest diamond producer, has once again announced a reduction in diamond prices. Diamond Giant Announces Price Cuts The widely influential slogan "A Diamond is Forever" has left a lasting mark. At the first routine diamond auction of the year, which commenced this week, De Beers significantly reduced the prices of rough diamonds larger than 0.75 carats. The exact magnitude of this price adjustment remains unclear. Informed sources revealed that De Beers implemented a unified pricing and invoicing policy for this auction—no longer setting individual prices for each box of diamonds but instead issuing a consolidated invoice for the total price, making the reduction difficult to quantify precisely. Industry insiders estimate the discount range to be around 10% to 15%. This price cut by De Beers stems from declining prices driven by a slump in global diamond demand. According to the RapNet Diamond Price Index (RAPI), in 2025, the RAPI for diamonds over 3 carats saw a slight decrease of 0.4%. Smaller, everyday consumer-grade diamonds, such as those in the 0.3 to 0.5 carat range, were significantly impacted by competition from lab-grown diamonds and weak demand, with the price for a 0.5-carat diamond falling over 20% throughout 2025.
De Beers holds considerable sway in the rough diamond market. The company hosts ten diamond auctions annually, where participating "sightholders" typically have little choice but to accept the set prices and quantities offered. However, in the current tense market environment, many diamond dealers are no longer willing to pay the prices dictated by De Beers. It is noteworthy that the diamond industry, long a symbol of global luxury, has been faltering in recent years. End-user demand remains persistently weak; in 2025, US imports of polished diamonds fell by 48% year-on-year, reflecting insufficient consumer confidence. High gold prices are steering consumers towards lightweight gold jewelry, further pressuring diamond demand. De Beers has accumulated over $2 billion in inventory, and since last year, the success rate of its diamond auctions has also been declining. Industry analysts point out that, as a leading upstream company, De Beers' price reduction aims to boost sales performance while also attempting to provide midstream processors with greater profit margins to stimulate market demand.
According to its official website, De Beers was founded in London in 1888, and its slogan "A Diamond is Forever" has had a widespread impact. As the world's largest diamond production and sales company, De Beers once accounted for 90% of the world's diamond supply by value and still controls approximately 60% of the global rough diamond trade. Diamond Ring Bought for 18,000 Yuan Ten Years Ago Depreciates by 99% Gold Prices Surge Over 400% in the Same Period In fact, the trend of significant declines in both diamond sales volume and price has persisted for several years. As early as September 2023, a report highlighted that certified diamond prices had fallen by 35% to 40% over the preceding year. Diamonds ranging from 0.5 to 3 carats were hit the hardest, with sales volume also dropping by 30% to 35% during the same period. At that time, De Beers had already slashed prices for its mainstream products—natural diamonds between 2 and 4 carats—by 40%. Subsequently, in January 2024, De Beers reduced the price of rough diamonds by about 10%, and then again in December 2024, cutting prices for rough diamonds sold on the secondary market by 10% to 15%. A report illustrated the issue: a woman from Chengdu who spent 100,000 yuan on a one-carat diamond ring ten years ago recently found its highest estimated resale value from multiple buyers to be only 30,000 yuan, the brilliance of her ring overshadowed by its steep depreciation. Another woman from Anhui shared on social media that a ring she purchased for 18,000 yuan a decade ago now fetches a mere 180 yuan upon resale, a staggering depreciation of 99%. This is not an isolated case; a 34-year-old woman in Xichang, Sichuan, discovered that the two wedding rings she bought for 14,000 yuan ten years ago together now sell for less than 200 yuan, lamenting, "I should have bought gold instead." For comparison, in January 2016, the price of Lao Feng Xiang gold was approximately 290 yuan per gram. By January 20, 2026, the price of Lao Feng Xiang gold had reached 1,456 yuan per gram, representing an increase of over 400%.
"Hardly anyone recycles small,碎钻 (sui zuan - melee diamonds), unless it's at a very cheap price," a jewelry industry trader stated, explaining that generally, only larger natural diamonds (referring to those over one carat) qualify for resale. However, at times like this, people realize that the diamonds they spent significant money on earlier are not actually good stores of value. The typical resale market offers 40% to 60% of the original price, depending on the item's quality and brand. Lab-Grown Diamond Sales Surge "Young People Account for 70% of Buyers" Furthermore, increasingly affordable lab-grown diamonds are severely squeezing the market share of natural diamonds. According to a report, in 2025, lab-grown diamonds accounted for over 40% of the global diamond jewelry market by volume, an increase of more than eight times since 2019. Concurrently, the retail price of lab-grown diamonds has fallen more than 50% from its peak in recent years. The price for a one-carat lab-grown diamond has now dropped from 8,000 yuan to around 3,500 yuan, less than one-tenth the price of a natural diamond of comparable quality.
Currently, China leads the world in the scale of its synthetic diamond industry, with an increasingly diverse range of downstream products. The "2024 China Jewelry Industry Development Report" mentioned that, based on incomplete statistics, China's output of lab-grown diamonds in 2024 was approximately 22 million carats, a year-on-year increase of 144.44%, accounting for 63% of global production. At a store specializing in lab-grown diamonds in Nanyang, Henan, a steady stream of consumers, predominantly young people, were seen inquiring and making purchases. The store manager indicated that young people constitute about 70% of their customers, and sales in 2025 doubled compared to the previous year.
Staff members stated that the clarity, color, and other metrics of these lab-grown diamonds are fully comparable to natural diamonds, making them difficult to distinguish with the naked eye, yet their price is only one-fifth or even lower than that of natural diamonds.
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