De Beers Yields to Slumping Market, Cuts Diamond Prices

De Beers cut its official diamond prices for the first time in over a year, ending its attempts to support the market amid slumping demand, according to a Bloomberg report.

The cuts, particularly for rough diamonds over three-quarters of a carat, come as the diamond industry faces one of its deepest and most prolonged crises in recent decades amid a pullback in Chinese luxury spending and rising popularity of synthetic stones. U.S. tariffs on India — the world’s largest diamond exporter — have added more pain.

De Beers typically tries to avoid price cuts because its outsize influence on the market means such a move can hit overall sentiment. Instead, the company has reportedly been secretly selling discounted stones to a small number of customers, while official prices remained about 25 percent higher than the going rate for some categories.

On Monday, the company sought to realign its position at the first regular sightholder sale of the year in Botswana, although the scale of the price cuts was not immediately clear. The company adopted one-line invoicing—issuing a single total instead of prices for each box—and changed some box assortments, making like-for-like comparisons difficult, Bloomberg reported.