China disrupting world’s diamond sector, tapping sophisticated technology to produce cheap synthetic alternatives
- Synthetic diamonds to become a bigger share of fine jewellery market
- China already makes the lion’s share of ‘lab grown’ diamonds
China is taking on the world’s diamond miners, using sophisticated technology to offer increasingly cheap alternatives that threaten to upend the lucrative fine jewellery market.
The technological disruption seen in medicine, autos, banking and countless other sectors is spilling over into diamonds, where an oligopoly of just four miners controls more than 60 per cent of production, according to consultancy Bain & Company.
It is happening as China taps the know-how it developed in becoming the world’s biggest maker of synthetic diamonds used primarily in the industrial cutting tools market.
By doing so, China now makes 56 per cent of the world’s gem-quality synthetic diamonds, far outpacing second-placed India.
While synthetic diamonds right now only account for 3.5 per cent of the world’s diamond jewellery, the share could grow to six per cent in four years, and even more later, says Paul Zimnisky, a New York-based independent diamond sector analyst.
