Lab-grown diamond producers eye fresh niches as prices plummet

The laboratory-grown diamond industry finds itself at a crossroads. It is grappling with how to thrive amid falling prices, oversupply and faltering trust in some quarters — while, at the same time, taking advantage of new opportunities both within and beyond the jewellery sector.

“Growing production volumes have gone hand in hand with falling prices,” says Paul Zimnisky, a diamond industry analyst. And the fall has been dramatic. “Over the past 10 years, the price of a slightly-better-than-medium-quality 1-carat, round, polished natural diamond is down about 25-30 per cent at retail,” according to Zimnisky.

“An equivalent lab-grown diamond is down about 90-95 per cent. Today, a generic lab-grown diamond can be bought for as little as one-20th the price of an equivalent natural diamond.”

There have been some high-profile casualties, most notably WD Lab Grown Diamonds — once the second-biggest US producer — which filed for bankruptcy in October last year. At the time, Zimnisky commented that it was “getting very difficult for anyone to compete with Chinese and Indian producers”.

Not surprisingly, falling prices have also triggered soaring consumer sales. Lab-grown diamonds now account for an estimated 20 per cent of the $89bn global diamond jewellery sales, up from nearly zero in 2015, Zimnisky says — and regulations and consumer protections are still catching up.

China and India may be the two largest producers, respectively, but it is the US that is the biggest retail market for lab-grown diamond jewellery.

So it is to the US, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), that India’s Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC) has turned to for a role model in how to tighten consumer protections in its own country, as jewellery buyers there become more tempted by the larger, man-made stones they are able to afford.

Last month, the GJEPC expressed its concern about the misuse of diamond-related terms and called on the Indian government to adopt the updated definition, terminology, and guidelines for diamonds set by the FTC. “By aligning with these standards, GJEPC seeks to promote transparency in the Indian market, safeguard consumer interests and maintain the integrity of the industry,” it explains. “In the absence of requisite consumer regulation in place, the lack of clarity around diamond classification in India has led to consumer confusion.”

Inevitably, with such huge differences in value between mined and man-made stones, fraud is a problem. Some instances involve opportunistic switching, as a case last month revealed, when the manager of a diamond company in Surat, the centre of India’s diamond-cutting and polishing industry, was charged with swapping natural diamonds worth more than £50,000 for lab-grown ones over a period of months.

Other frauds are more sophisticated. The International Gemological Institute revealed earlier this year that it had uncovered a lab-grown 6.01 carat pear-cut stone masquerading as a natural diamond. The stone had a laser inscription linked to an online description of a natural diamond, with which it shared several characteristics.

Lab-grown diamonds are also being used for money laundering. Late last year, Indian and Hong Kong customs revealed a joint operation in which they discovered “cheap synthetic diamonds were being imported into India in the guise of natural diamonds, to remit foreign currency out of India”, according to an Indian government statement.

“Investigations revealed that cheap synthetic diamonds were being mis-declared as natural diamonds and overvalued more than 100 times and being imported from firms based in Hong Kong to SEZ [special economic zones] in India,” the statement continued. “The importing entity was also found to be exporting jewellery studded with diamonds at a very inflated value to Hong Kong and a few other countries.”

Methods of detecting lab-grown stones are becoming more sophisticated, however. The Gemological Institute of America (GIA) has its own diamond-producing foundry as part of its mission to ensure its instruments can recognise the most sophisticated lab-grown stones.

“What we are trying to do is to grow them [diamonds] and anticipate different ways to make them more difficult to identify,” says Tom Moses, chief research and laboratory officer at the GIA. “At the same time, our scientists and engineers are building instruments that will simply identify a man-made diamond. So we grow the diamonds, try and fool the instruments and, then, modify the instruments.”

The GIA recently gave diamond bourses around the world its latest instruments so that their members can come in “and in a matter of seconds verify if their diamonds are natural or not”, says Moses.

The lab-grown diamond industry is also having to face up to falling prices and how they affect its business model — as well as the models of companies all along the supply chain through to retailers.

Diamond Foundry, one of the leading US producers of lab-grown diamonds, believes its long-term strategies have allowed it to sidestep these concerns. “We have managed to advance our technology faster than prices have dropped,” says Martin Roscheisen, the company’s chief executive. “We have a substantial R&D investment in proprietary technology.”

Diamond Foundry has also moved towards producing larger diamond blocks. “Our average diamond rough piece is now larger than 45 carats. We have a unique position in market with a market share larger than 90 per cent for large diamonds,” notes Roscheisen.

Meanwhile, the company is positioning itself as a leader in producing diamond wafers suitable for computer chips. Diamonds can withstand much higher temperatures than silicon and could revolutionise applications in the tech sector.

This pivot towards the potentially hugely lucrative markets of the future is being eyed by other companies. According to Chinese state-owned publication Sixth Tone, falling prices are leading Chinese producers of lab-grown diamonds to “refocus on industrial diamonds”. Sixth Tone referred to a recent prospectus from one of China’s leading diamond producers, Henan Huanghe Whirlwind, in which the company said it would “look to grow more diamonds for semiconductors, solar and other emerging industries”.

This option is not open to all producers, however. “Almost every diamond grower won’t make it in tech,” says Roscheisen, who points out that producing diamond wafers requires “a whole different level of tech”.

A report published last year on the lab-grown diamond industry by the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, a business hub for the emirate, made several recommendations for the sector. One was for producers to add value by focusing on innovation such as novel diamond shapes. Other commentators have suggested moving into costume jewellery and taking advantage of the low prices for stones to create customised, more playful pieces, for example.

Zimnisky believes product innovations are essential for the survival of smaller producers, but “if we are just talking about standard, colourless, round-shaped lab diamonds, I think we will end up with only a small handful of very large-scale producers in India and China”, he says.