Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7tGZzwe4mQ
For over a hundred years, DeBeers has dominated and controlled the global diamond trade.
But today, Chinese factories are mass-producing lab-grown diamonds, which are chemically identical to natural stones, and prices are collapsing worldwide for both man-made and natural diamonds.
DeBeers sources most of their rough diamonds from mines in Botswana, and the new government there is determined to move DeBeers’ value chains to Botswana itself, thereby retaining billions of dollars in industry revenues in-country.
Anglo-American is DeBeers’ parent company, and they are trying to divest their holdings. But even after writing off $4.5 billion in book value in two years, no buyers can be found.
God, I remember when this was a super-secret technology, where you had to book a plane to the (recently, at the time) former USSR to get a look at some highly experimental machines that were producing itty bitty little yellow diamonds via some bizarre anoxic chemical vapor process. I read about it in some indie magazine 25 to 30 years ago I think?
Even back then DeBeers was peeing its pants over the possibility that law-grown diamonds not only existed, but were nearly impossible to distinguish from mined diamonds by sight alone. I’m so happy to see them finally get what’s been coming to them.