De Beers feeling the heat of lab-grown diamonds and depressed market
Good Morning Cape Town with Lester Kiewit · 20 July 2026 · 5m
Speaker 1: Good morning, Cape Town. Lester Kibbott, starting your day on Cave Talk. The demise and Speaker 1: the decline in the demand for diamonds long being on the wall. Last week, mining Speaker 1: giant the Beer's announcing its suspending production at the country's biggest diamond mind for two Speaker 1: years because it's the saying changing consumer habits is shrinking profits. Prices across the industry Speaker 1: have fallen because why fewer people are buying diamonds than in the past when it Speaker 1: was the last time you bought a diamond. It's been about ten years for a Speaker 1: wedding green for for the wife. But also in its major market China, the consumption Speaker 1: of the demand for diamonds has fallen, but there's also some stuff competition from cheaper Speaker 1: lab grown diamonds. Peter Major's a mining analyst and director of minding at Modern Corporate Speaker 1: Solutions. Good morning, Peter, talking to us from Idaho in the US. Was this decline Speaker 1: in the appetite for diamonds? Was it inevitable? In April or radio we've had and Speaker 1: the same, Well, the writing is on the wall for the diamond production industry. Speaker 2: It's hard to say if it's inevitable, but the writing has been on the wall, Speaker 2: probably since the beers in general electric first perfect then the way of creating artificial Speaker 2: diamonds, and we call them artificial I'm probably incorrect lab grown diamonds. So that was Speaker 2: decades and decades ago. But by the end of the nineteen nineties the Russians had Speaker 2: done a pretty good job of making larger lab drown diamonds that could be grown Speaker 2: quite a bit cheaper. And as we all know, once…
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