Editor’s Note
De Beers, the world’s leading diamond supplier, has announced a significant price reduction for rough diamonds over 0.75 carats at its first auction of the year. This move highlights ongoing market adjustments within the global diamond industry.
De Beers, the world’s largest diamond producer and seller, recently announced another price cut for diamonds. On the 20th, at this year’s first diamond auction, De Beers significantly lowered the selling price of rough diamonds weighing over 0.75 carats. The exact magnitude of this price adjustment is currently unknown.
Insiders stated that De Beers adopted a unified invoice pricing strategy at this auction—no longer setting individual prices for each box of diamonds, but instead issuing a consolidated total price invoice, making the extent of the price reduction difficult to calculate. Industry insiders estimate the price reduction range to be around 10% to 15%.
According to the RapNet Diamond Price Index (RAPI), in 2025, the RAPI for diamonds over 3 carats fell slightly by 0.4%; small-grain, daily consumer-grade diamonds of 0.3-0.5 carats, impacted by the impact of lab-grown diamonds and softening demand, saw a significant price drop. In 2025, the price of 0.5-carat diamonds fell by over 20% for the year.
Analysts pointed out that as a leading upstream company in the industry, De Beers’ purpose in cutting prices is, on one hand, to hope to boost sales performance, and on the other hand, to hope to give midstream processing merchants greater profit margins to stimulate market demand.
The trend of both diamond sales volume and prices falling significantly has persisted for several years. As early as 2023, the price of certified diamonds had fallen by 35% to 40%. In January 2024, De Beers lowered the price of rough diamonds by about 10%, and in December of the same year, it lowered the price of polished diamonds sold in the secondary market by 10% to 15%.
According to reports, a decade ago, Ms. Li, a resident of Chengdu, spent tens of thousands of yuan to purchase a one-carat diamond ring. Today, she has inquired with multiple recycling merchants and received a highest valuation of no more than thirty thousand yuan.
A trader in the jewelry industry told reporters that generally only natural diamonds over one carat are qualified to be recycled. But at this point, people will find that those diamonds they spent a lot of money on earlier are actually not value-preserving. The general recycling practice is 40-60% of the original price, and the specific amount still depends on the color and brand of the item.
The softening diamond market forms a stark contrast with the continuously rising price of gold. In January 2016, a decade ago, the price of old temple gold was about 290 yuan per gram, while on January 20, 2026, it had reached 1,456 yuan per gram, an increase of over 400%.
This is the recent sentiment of many consumers. If time were turned back to 2012, when the gold price was about 338 yuan per gram, if 18,000 yuan had been spent to purchase gold, it could now be sold for about 45,000 yuan.
In addition, the increasingly lower-priced lab-grown diamonds are also severely squeezing the survival space of natural diamonds.
The “2025 Lab-Grown Diamond Industry Development Report” shows that it is estimated that by 2030, the scale of China’s lab-grown diamond market will exceed one hundred billion yuan. According to the report, as of now, the global polished lab-grown diamond production capacity is about 40 million carats, with China’s production capacity being about 25.2 million carats, accounting for about 63%. China is the core production force for global lab-grown diamonds.
In recent years, the retail price of lab-grown diamonds has fallen by more than 50% from its peak. Today, the price of 1-carat lab-grown diamonds has fallen from 8,000 yuan to 3,500 yuan, less than one-tenth of the price of natural diamonds of the same quality.
