At the end of July 2025, Anglo American PLC (LON: AAL) disappointed its shareholders by cutting its interim dividend by 80%, from $0.42 to $0.07. The reason for this decision, according to the company's management, was the disastrous situation at De Beers. Indeed, in the first half of 2025, diamond production fell by 23%, revenue decreased by 13% (compared to the first half of 2024) and the loss amounted to $189 million. The second half of 2025 is also forecasted to be unprofitable. It is easy to see that for Anglo American PLC the diamond division has become a frankly toxic asset, it sees no prospects for recovery of the diamond market and therefore is doing everything to get rid of loss-generating De Beers. The book value of De Beers was twice lowered in 2023 and 2025, eventually dropping from $8.5 billion to $4.1 billion. There is already information that the value of De Beers may be reduced to $1.5 billion, and even that the legendary diamond company may be sold off piecemeal. It is understandable, there is no queue of daredevils willing to buy an unprofitable asset in a frankly falling market.
Yes, the markets of natural and polished diamonds are in a state of a «perfect storm» today. An exceptional combination of unfavorable factors of both market and non-market nature has led to an unprecedented crisis. Political games around the Russian-Ukrainian conflict first made 30% of the world diamond production «bloody» and «illegitimate», and then led to tariff wars that destroyed logistical and financial links between traditional diamond centers. Moreover, numerous industry superstructures created in the era of globalization, all these «councils», «processes», «associations» etc., demonstrated the lack of real lobbying potential and absolute inability to resist political negativity. At the same time, cannibalization by a powerful species competitor - lab-grown diamonds (LGD) - has already led to a loss of about 20% of the market, and in the sector of engagement and wedding jewelry - to a loss of over 50%. All claims that the expansion of LGD will stop here or at least reduce its pace have no serious grounds.
In the days of the single-channel system, the diamond market reacted to crises by reducing production and regulating the volume of effluents, which made it possible to manage supply. Such an attempt is still observed today. Alas, it is already useless, as the limitation of supply of natural diamonds is immediately compensated by the increasing flow of LGD, which gives a very unusual picture - prices for natural diamonds have been continuously falling for the past three years, while production has been significantly reduced.
In addition to the LGD factor, several other circumstances have a negative impact on the markets for natural rough and polished diamonds. Over the last century, a huge stock of polished diamonds has accumulated on the hands of the population in the countries that form the basis of the polished diamond market. Apparently, the pressure of this mass has exceeded a critical level and that is why today on the secondary market prices for polished diamonds of mass categories are 60% to 80% lower than in retail chains. Interspecies competition from other industries (travel, gadgets, luxury clothing and accessories, etc.) is high and continues to intensify. The behavior and attitudes of the most important generations of millennials and zoomers for the diamond market (in particular, a sharp decline in the number of marriages), critically do not correspond to the narratives used in traditional generic marketing of diamonds.
If events continue to develop within the current trends, the following may happen in the next 3 - 5 years: prices for mass categories of natural polished diamonds will continue to decline, aiming to reach the level of the secondary market, and LGDs will capture a share of at least 50% in value and 80% in volume. The fragmentation of the natural polished diamond market, which is quite obvious even today, will sharply intensify: large-sized (above 5 ct.) polished diamonds with good characteristics and colored diamonds will be in high demand and, accordingly, will increase in price. Everything else will lose the competition to synthetics.
But such fragmentation of the market will not allow large diamond mining companies to stay afloat, primarily De Beers, which is already unprofitable today, and ALROSA, which is experiencing similar problems (its revenue fell by 25% in the first half of 2025), since the profitable segment in the total mass of diamonds mined by them will account for no more than 15% to 20%. As a result of the collapse and liquidation of large mining companies, the basis for both the remnants of the price management mechanism through supply regulation and traditional type marketing will finally disappear. As a result, the industry will degenerate to the state it was in at the end of the 19th century and will resemble modern opal mining, or, for example, sapphire mining, with the corresponding principles of pricing and market organization.
Is there a way to counteract the negative trends and return the markets of natural diamonds and polished diamonds to the trajectory of positive development? Of course, the ideal solution, effective and long-term, would be a return to the canonical monopolistic (cartel) organization of the diamond market, but for many reasons this is impossible today. Therefore, it is advisable to focus on a variant, which we will further refer to as «accidental» or «urgent» marketing - «emergency marketing».
The problem statement looks as follows. It is necessary to create within a fairly short period of time (1 - 2 years) an information shell (image) of a natural diamond and a polished diamond, which would be able to constantly be in the focus of attention of consumers born in 1980 - 2010, belonging to the economically active strata of the population of the main countries significant for the diamond market, primarily the USA. At the same time, the image of a natural diamond in the perception of consumers should be separated from the image of an LGD by the criterion «unique original - infinitely replicable copy». Or, to put it another way, it is necessary to significantly intensify the interest of millennials and zoomers in natural diamonds and fundamentally distinguish natural diamonds and LGD in their perception, which will create the necessary conditions for the return of the positions lost by the natural diamond and polished diamond markets.
The very formulation of such a task is not a revelation, in a sense it is a platitude that is realized by all market participants. In spite of this, the generic marketing carried out by the Natural Diamond Council (NDC) specially created to solve this task and, in parallel, by the marketing services of major market operators, turned out to be a complete failure, moreover, it only aggravated the situation. Analyzing the main reasons for this failure is important, because it can lead to the right solution.
The leitmotif of the content created by NDC and other generators of generic marketing and posted on social networks, on partner sites and in the press is the conflict-free image of a natural diamond and a diamond. From direct statements like «99.9% of natural diamonds are certified conflict-free» to countless examples of how natural «diamonds do good». Recently Mining Weekly published an article devoted to the outstanding achievements of De Beers on the path of doing good. These include development of solar energy, production of fuel from recycled tires, production of biodiesel from oilseeds, saving the population of rhinos and penguins, promoting gender equality, and other initiatives that meet «best practice environmental, social and governance standards». All of this, of course, is wonderful and deserves the warmest applause. The problem, however, is that De Beers is doing great with tire recycling and penguins, while selling diamonds is not so good, with losses all around. One can only envy the fate of elephants in Botswana and indigenous communities in Canada, but it is strange that diamond prices are falling for the third year in a row.
Why did investing a lot of time and money in creating a conflict-free, impeccably ethical image of a diamond result in the degradation of the market? The answer is simple - the image of a natural diamond created in the «conflict-free» marketing paradigm turned out to be banally boring, simply uninteresting to the audience of consumers who are able to pay for this product. This is clearly visible in social networks, where the materials generated by NDC are accompanied by almost zero user activity.
Meanwhile, historically, the most successful marketing campaigns have historically created an image of a diamond that is maximally integrated into powerful conflicts that permeate the target audience. Such were the «Diamonds Go to the Front» campaigns in the U.S. in 1940 - 1945 and the campaign to promote diamonds in Japan in 1960 - 1970. Both achieved outstanding results: the American market of diamond jewelry tripled during the Second World War, and Japan ranked second in the world in absolute volumes of diamond engagement ring purchases and first in relative consumption. The conflict in the first example is obvious and needs no explanation, but the example with generic marketing of diamonds in Japan requires a little commentary. Today, especially in Europe and the United States, few people realize that the westernization of Japan, on the wave of which diamonds were promoted as a symbol of Western values, was a deep and painful conflict in the course of which traditional cultural and ethical traditions were destroyed. The depth of this conflict was reflected in the tragic fates of prominent members of the nation, such as five-time Nobel nominee Yukio Mishima, who participated in the attempted military coup in 1970 and paid with his life for his adherence to traditional cultural codes.
These two examples are convincing proof that generic marketing of diamonds, utilizing the energy of powerful conflicts in which the target audience is involved, can lead to outstanding success. On the contrary, «sterilization» of a diamond image, excluding even a hint of conflicts from its information shell, makes its image boring and uninteresting, thus reducing the number of potential buyers.
As for the problem of opposing the expansion of LGD, a number of mistakes of a different kind were made. And chief among these mistakes is that de-facto LGDs have been recognized as a worthy species competitor. NDC spent a lot of time and money to unleash a noisy discussion on the topic «why natural diamonds are preferable to LGDs», with very dubious arguments being used as evidence. Today it is already obvious that the effect of such counter-marketing was quite the opposite: the attention of potential consumers naturally shifted to the product «chased» by the marketers of the natural diamond industry. The effect, by the way, is well known and predictable in marketing - attempts of market giants to «trample» a newcomer offering innovative alternatives to goods and services inevitably arouse interest in the latter among the consumer audience. And the newcomer has only to modulate the discussion correctly, in our case using rather primitive greenwashing tactics. It is quite remarkable that LGD manufacturers, initially operating in a fiercely competitive environment, have not attempted to create an industry marketing generator like NDC. Why? By engaging in a polemic as an equal competitor, the NDC provided the required consumer attention to diamond synthetics, all that was left for the competitor to do was to properly utilize this energy. By comparison, have you ever heard of counter-marketing campaigns organized by manufacturers of natural furs proving the advantages of this product over syntepon and fleece?
Ultimately, we have to state that the generic marketing practiced by the industry today has only led to a loss of consumer interest in natural diamonds and has contributed in no small part to the successful expansion of LGD. And titanic efforts aimed at apologizing for the notorious «sustainable development» did not contribute in any way to the growth of sales, since rhinos, elephants and the population of diamond-producing countries sponsored by the diamond industry do not buy polished diamonds.
So, the meaning of «emergency marketing» is to connect the image of a natural diamond with the conflicts that permeate the society of the countries that form the core of the modern diamond market. The main target audience is people aged 15 - 45 years old, conventionally belonging to the «middle class». These consumers exist in a conflict environment, which largely determines their behavior, including consumer behavior, and the turbulence of which is increasing quite rapidly. Conflicts are of various nature - racial, property, religious, ideological, generational, etc., for marketing purposes only the current relevance, mass and amplitude are important. The integration of the diamond image into a large-scale conflict is a matter of technology - it will be different for each conflict. But the general principle is to use historical content somehow related to the diamond industry. Yes, the potential consumer should be «told stories about natural diamonds», but it should not be stories about how De Beers is saving the elephant population in Botswana, but, for example, the story that the Goering family was friends with De Beers founder Cecil Rhodes and Hermann Goering tried to use this fact in a very peculiar way at the Nuremberg trials. And such a story should be projected onto the growing racial conflict in the U.S. and emigration conflict in Europe, it should become an actual part of online discussions of experts, journalists, authors of social networking channels with millions of audience. Of course, the marketing task is not to analyze the views of Rhodes or Goring on the racial problem, it is only important to actualize and maintain interest in the image of a natural diamond for as long as possible in a multi-million audience of potential consumers involved in the orbit of a powerful social conflict.
It should be noted that such use of historical content automatically separates the information shell of a natural diamond from the LGD image, because synthetics simply do not have such a history. Yes, the main marketing advantage of natural diamonds over synthetic diamonds is a fantastically interesting history of the industry, which is still full of mysterious and debatable moments. But the realization of this advantage is possible only through the projection of this history into powerful modern conflicts, this is the only way to return the attention of the consumer audience to diamonds. On the same path lies the solution to the challenge of dividing markets. The endless discussion about the advantages of natural diamonds over synthetic diamonds, especially with such a set of arguments as the NDC is using, is a marketing dead end. A shouting competition in greenwashing is an unworthy venture that should be abandoned altogether. The marketing paradigm should be different - there is the original, a carrier of proven provenance (in this case - it is a century of industry history) and there is a replicated copy, the history of which is just the history of the creation of the copy. And if you are a connoisseur (and you are, of course, a connoisseur) you will prefer the original, and even if you cannot afford to buy an original today, you should strive for it, make efforts, dream, finally. The point is small - a potential consumer should be turned into a connoisseur of diamond history, and this can be done quickly and effectively only by projecting this history on the conflicts in which this consumer is involved in one way or another today.
Does the proposed approach carry risks? Will the consumer not turn away from diamonds completely if friends of penguins and fans of solar energy suddenly appear in historical projections in discussions, for example, on racial issues? There are quite a lot of examples showing that for marketing it is the module that matters, not the sign, in other words, recognizability is important, and whether it is connected with a negative or positive reputation is secondary. A fresh example is the Sydney Sweeney blue jeans story, when the brand's accusations of racism dramatically boosted sales and share price. But there is a more impressive example, especially since, unlike jeans, it concerns a product that, like diamonds, falls under Veblen's definition of goods.
What are the most sought after artifacts in today's mass antique market? You might be surprised, but they are artifacts of the Third Reich, which existed for only 12 and a bit years (January 1933 - May 1945). Weapons, uniforms, awards, documents, photographs, banknotes and coins, books, etc. - all this is sold and bought in small antique shops and at prestigious auctions, the price range from a few dozen dollars to hundreds of thousands. A huge flow of Chinese fakes of this product only emphasizes its demand and popularity. Do millions of collectors, sellers and buyers in this market adhere to Nazi ideology? And is it even appropriate to talk about reputation here? Certainly, the vast majority of collectors of such artifacts are not adherents of Nazism, and the reputation of the Third Reich is the darkest. So what motivates our contemporaries to buy this merchandise? The colossal interest in the brightest, though terrible historical episode in the history of civilization and the undoubted relevance of historical projections on modern conflicts, it is not for nothing that allusions to this time are a frequent attribute of modern publicity.
Of course, the proposed «emergency marketing» is a palliative, the effect of which can be achieved quite quickly, but is unlikely to last long. However, given the state of affairs in the diamond market today, the speed of marketing efforts should be a priority. Otherwise, soon there will be no one to save penguins.
Sergey Goryainov is an independent journalist, who writes on topics related to the diamond industry. He is an author of several books and over 200 publications in specialized press. From 2000 to 2006, he was a member of the ALROSA Information Policy Council. Sergey is currently working on a book about the operations of the Third Reich and Stalin's USSR in the diamond market. This article reflects solely his personal opinion.