Editor’s Note
This article explores the divergent paths of two traditional assets—diamonds and gold—over the past two decades. While diamond rings have lost their luster in resale markets, gold has surged in value, highlighting deeper trends in asset durability and cultural shifts.
Over a decade ago, a diamond ring worth tens of thousands of yuan was a top-tier status symbol at weddings. Twenty years later, it is now nearly ignored in the second-hand market. Meanwhile, the price of gold, which was only a few hundred yuan per gram back then, has long since broken through the thousand-yuan mark.
This contrast between “soaring” and “plummeting” is not merely a matter of personal choice; it more clearly reveals the different fates of these two asset classes within the global economic cycle and industrial transformation. Over the past decade, the price of gold has surged nearly fourfold, continuously hitting new historical highs. In contrast, the diamond price index has retreated about 45% from its peak, and industry giant De Beers has been forced to significantly cut prices to cope with the “unprecedented” decline.
The feedback from the domestic capital market is even more direct: the stock prices of leading diamond brands have fallen by about 80% from their historical peaks, while the market capitalization of A-share gold leaders has already broken through the trillion-yuan mark.
Twenty years ago, when Zhang Jing got married, her family specifically spent 100,000 yuan in Guangzhou to buy her a fashionable diamond ring, hailed as the “top-tier” of its time. Back then, the gold processing fee was just over 100 yuan per gram, and she also symbolically bought the “three golds” (gold jewelry), totaling about 100 grams.
Now, her son is also about to get married. Recently, Zhang Jing went to a gold shop to inquire and found that the diamond ring from back then is now almost ignored, while the price of gold has long broken through a thousand yuan per gram. The hundred grams of gold she bought back then are now worth exactly 100,000 yuan. Coincidentally, it offsets the cost of that diamond ring.
Li Xiaojie, who works in the jewelry industry in Shenzhen, told reporters that eight years ago when she got married, she followed a friend’s advice that “diamonds hold their value better” and purchased a diamond ring worth nearly 20,000 yuan. Now she wants to replace it but was told the buyback price is less than 400 yuan, while the gold bracelet she bought is actually worth a bit more, valued at over 1,000 yuan. If she had bought a gold necklace during the same period, its value would have already exceeded 70,000 yuan.
Their experiences also reflect the price trends of gold and diamonds in China’s wedding market over these years.
Looking at a ten-year scale, gold and diamonds show completely opposite trends. Wind data shows that the spot price of London gold started from a low point of around $1,000 per ounce in 2015, entered an accelerated upward channel in 2022, and recently broke through $5,100 per ounce historically, with a cumulative increase exceeding fourfold.
In sharp contrast, the International Diamond Exchange (IDEX) diamond index has been declining from its phased high of 158 in 2022 and is currently near 86.08, a drop of over 45% in between. This downward trend has not stopped after entering 2025. The RapNet Diamond Price Index (RAPI) shows that throughout 2025, the price of 0.5-carat diamonds fell by over 20%, and even diamonds over 3 carats were not spared, recording a slight decline of 0.4%.
According to reports, on January 20, at this year’s first diamond auction, international diamond giant De Beers significantly lowered the selling price of rough diamonds over 0.75 carats. Over the past five years, De Beers has adjusted prices multiple times, and at the end of last year, it even cut the price of rough diamonds by 10% to 15%, setting a record for the largest price drop in history.
As the world’s largest diamond producer, De Beers’ pricing strategy has always been a market bellwether, traditionally being very restrictive and rarely engaging in large-scale price cuts, striving to maintain the image of diamonds as a high-end luxury item that preserves and increases value. However, facing the current market environment, this persistence has been broken.
The insider further revealed that market differentiation is very obvious. Currently, the most severely depreciated are precisely the 0.5-carat and smaller entry-level diamond rings that had the largest sales volume in the wedding market in the past, with their second-hand prices and buyback values showing a significant decline. In comparison, diamonds over 1 carat with relatively higher quality, although also under pressure, have relatively firmer price performance.
The divergence between the gold and diamond markets is also directly reflected in the market performance of related companies.
On one side is the chill in the diamond track. DR Diamond Ring’s parent company, Diar (301177.SZ), saw its stock price surge 41% on its first day of listing on the ChiNext board in 2021, once breaking through 160 yuan per share. But thereafter, affected by the diamond market cycle, the stock price fluctuated downward, touching a low of 16.91 yuan per share in early 2024. Although the stock price has recently rebounded to around 33 yuan per share, it has still accumulated a decline of over 80% from its historical peak.
On the other side is the heat in the gold sector. As the company with the largest market capitalization in the A-share gold sector, Zijin Mining (601899.SH, 02899.HK) welcomed a historic moment on January 6, with its stock price soaring over 6% in a single day and its market value once breaking through the 1 trillion yuan mark. Looking back at the entire 2025, the company’s stock price rose by as much as 135.77% for the year, achieving six consecutive years of gains. According to incomplete statistics by First Financial, including major gold companies like China Gold, Hunan Gold, and Shandong Gold, stock prices all achieved significant increases in 2025.
Why have gold and diamonds, both symbolic “eternal” commodities, shown such divergent price trends in recent years? Multiple interviewed industry insiders believe that the “collapse” of the diamond market is more due to a reversal in the supply-demand relationship.
From the demand side, one of the largest traditional markets for natural diamonds—wedding demand—is cooling down globally.
Taking Japan and South Korea as examples, data from the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare shows that in 2023, Japan had 489,300 newlywed couples, the first time since World War II that the number fell below 500,000. According to data from Statistics Korea, the number of marriage registrations in South Korea has shown a consecutive decreasing trend for 11 years since 2012, and has hit new record lows for four consecutive years since 2019. In 1996, the number of marriage registrations was still above 400,000 pairs; it dropped to 389,000 in 1997; and broke through 300,000 and 200,000 pairs in 2016 and 2021, respectively.
Changes on the supply side are even more profound. For many years, De Beers in South Africa held a super-monopoly position, accounting for 90% of the global diamond supply. However, as large diamond mines have been discovered successively around the world, De Beers’ monopoly has begun to decline.
An even more impactful force is the sudden rise of lab-grown diamonds. “Lab-grown diamonds are rapidly changing the entire industry landscape,” a person in charge of a jewelry store in Beijing told reporters. Not only is its production cost far lower than that of natural diamonds, but its price is also only about one-tenth that of the latter, and its quality is not inferior, which has greatly impacted the natural diamond market.