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The COVID-19 coronavirus continues to make it presence felt on the diamond and jewelry markets, with De Beers citing the worldwide epidemic as a primary reason for its cutting the size of rough diamond allocation in February, which was 36 percent down on the amount reported just one month earlier.
Diamonds, as we are discovering, are valued for much more than their physical beauty. Their physical properties are highly sought out by industry, medicine, industry, quantum computing technologies and biological sensing. No wonder then that they are gaining ever increasing attention in the scientific community.
To possibly understand what long-term impact the current coronavirus could have on the diamond business, it may be useful to consider a lesson from past industry history. It dates back to the months leading up and after the First Gulf War in 1991.
According to Kimberley Process (KP) rules, there is only current source of goods in the market that can be qualified as conflict diamonds, and those are rough goods being mined by artisanal miners in the Central African Republic (CAR).
De Beers reported its earnings for 2019, which are at the lowest ebb since a majority shareholding in the company was purchased by the miner Anglo American Corporation bought it in 2012.
The coronoavirus, which has dominated the world’s attention in the little more than three weeks since news about it first broke, is becoming as much an economic story as it is a health crisis. Indeed, while scientists are still unsure about whether it will eventually be qualified as a pandemic, it is already apparent that it is impacting on markets and economies on a global scale.
The past decade was a good one for those who invested in fancy colored diamonds. According to Fancy Color Research Foundation (FCRF), which last week published an analysis of the Fancy Color Diamond Index (FCDI) in 2019 and over the last decade. During the years 2010 to 2019 the general index showed a steady market price increase of 77 percent.
Coming off a strong holiday season, Americans are expected to set another record for Valentine’s Day spending this year, according to an annual survey released by the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics.
Some three years ago, in its 2017 Insight Report, De Beers identified self-empowered, self-purchasing women as among the diamond industry’s most promising sources of future growth.
On February 3, 2020, the shareholders of Tiffany & Co. made official what had already been announced on November 24 last year, as they voted in favor of a takeover by the luxury giant LVMH Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton for $16.2 billion, or $135 per share in cash. And so, America’s most iconic diamond jewelry brand came under the umbrella of a group that already owns names like Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Celine and Bulgari.
The coranavirus, the epidemic which at time of writing is largely contained to China but has already traveled to a number countries on all five continents, is rattling the luxury product markets. Comparable to the SARS epidemic that first struck in the same part of the world in 2003 and 2004, its global economic effects are likely to be larger because China’s share of the global economy is considerably bigger today, and also because economies are much more interlinked than they were 17 years ago.
Within the most exclusive echelons of diamond jewelry collectors the name De Grisogono was something of an enigma. A Geneva-based jewelry house, it had been founded in 1993 by former Bulgari executive, Fawaz Gruosi, an Italian of Lebanese origin. At the time he promised customers an offering of exclusive works of art and black-diamond jewelry. The company’s name, which is rooted in both the Latin word “Chrysogonus” and the and Greek word “Chrysogonos,” means “begotten of gold”.
The second largest rough diamond ever discovered, the Sewelo, has been acquired by Louis Vuitton, the French fashion house and luxury retail company owned by the world’s largest luxury product brand, LVMH.
For 35 years Australia has been considered a major diamond producer, albeit in terms of volume rather than the value. This status is almost entirely due to one single mine, Argyle. Producing more than 90 percent of the country’s rough diamonds, at the peak of its production, in 1994, it was putting into the market some 42 million carats, about 40 percent of total world output. But all this is scheduled to end in the fourth quarter of 2020.
The second largest rough diamond ever discovered, the Sewelo, has been acquired by Louis Vuitton, the French fashion house and luxury retail company owned by the world’s largest luxury product brand, LVMH.
A lawsuit just filed in a federal courtroom in the Southern District of New York has underscored how different the laboratory-grown diamond business is from the natural diamond industry.
As it does it each year, through the end of January and the first two weeks of February the Arizona desert will attract gemstone and jewelry buyers from around the world.
A watershed moment for the diamond industry occurred on May 29, 2018, the day before the start of the JCK Show in Las Vegas. In a move that few expected, the world’s most well know rough diamond mining company announced that it was launching a fashion jewelry brand with laboratory-grown diamonds called Lightbox Jewelry. They would begin selling online that September at a fixed price of $800 per carat, which at the time was about 75 percent lower than those being charged by existing lab-grown diamond producers.
A watershed moment for the diamond industry occurred on May 29, 2018, the day before the start of the JCK Show in Las Vegas. In a move that few expected, the world’s most well know rough diamond mining company announced that it was launching a fashion jewelry brand with laboratory-grown diamonds called Lightbox Jewelry. They would begin selling online that September at a fixed price of $800 per carat, which at the time was about 75 percent lower than those being charged by existing lab-grown diamond producers.
The massive growth of the diamond market that occurred largely during the second half of the 20th Century, in the years following World War !!, was led by three generations of Western buyers, which today are known largely as the Great Generation, comprising individuals who fought or were married to soldiers who were involved in the Second World War; the Baby Boomers, who born during the economic boom period of 1950 and 1960s, and Generation X, which came into its own during the 1970s and 1980s.
Christmas 2019 has come and gone and New Year Eve is soon upon us. Gifts have been given, unwrapped and even returned. Official data will be not be out until mid-January, but in the United States jewelry retailers have already begun summing up the holiday season that has just past, and initial reports seem pretty positive.
With the last of its ten rough diamond sales cycles wrapping up December, De Beers has ended the year on a little more of an upbeat note, but nonetheless down on what it reported in 2018.
With the last of its ten rough diamond sales cycles wrapping up December, De Beers has ended the year on a little more of an upbeat note, but nonetheless down on what it reported in 2018.
Technological developments are changing the nature of the laboratory-grown diamond market, and in particular those stones that are synthesized using CVD techniques, states Bain and Co., in its recent report on the diamond industry produced together with the Antwerp World Diamond Center (AWDC).
The 2019 end-of-the-year shopping season began powerfully in the United States, the world’s largest market, with a record 189.6 million U.S. shopped from Thanksgiving Day, November 28, through Cyber Monday, five days later, an increase of 14 percent over last year’s 165.8 million, reported the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics.