Key takeaways
- Richemont and Signet Jewelers are in advanced talks to join the Global Diamond Consortium, the preferred bidder to acquire De Beers, a mining company that controls one of the world’s largest rough diamond supply networks.
- The diamond market has split in two. Lab grown stones now account for 47% of newly appraised engagement rings in the US, with prices down 30–50% since 2022. At the high end, natural diamonds are recovering after three consecutive years of declining demand.
- A stake in the consortium would give Richemont and Signet direct influence over how the finest natural diamonds are sourced and allocated.
- If the deal goes through, the brands that depend most on natural diamond scarcity will no longer be buying from the system, they will be part of it.
Last week, reports from Bloomberg and Reuters revealed that both Richemont (the Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels parent that draws about 75% of its sales from jewelry) and Signet Jewelers are negotiating to join the Global Diamond Consortium, the top contender to buy De Beers from Anglo American. According to sources close to the matter, talks are progressing smoothly, though nothing is finalized. Expect any investment from either player to stay relatively small, given how many government entities and private investors have already committed to the consortium.
Before anything else, De Beers is a mining company. It operates some of the world’s largest diamond mines across Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Canada, and runs a tightly controlled procurement network through which rough diamonds are allocated to approved buyers in fixed quantities at set intervals. The jewelry retail brand exists alongside that, but it is not the real asset. What Anglo American is selling is the rough supply infrastructure of the diamond trade.
Not the same market anymore
The potential sale arrives as the diamond market undergoes its most significant structural shift in decades. Lab grown diamonds — produced at industrial scale and increasingly indistinguishable from natural stones to the naked eye — have flooded the accessible end of the market. In 2025, unit sales rose 14%, but category revenue fell 1%, and loose stone prices dropped between 30 and 50%. From under 6% of newly appraised engagement rings in 2019, lab grown stones reached 47% by 2025. Rough diamond prices are now approximately 50% below their 2022 peak.
The high end tells a different story altogether. Luxury jewelry closed 2025 as the best-performing personal luxury goods category, growing at 5% and outpacing leather goods, watches, and beauty — a result set against three consecutive years of declining natural diamond demand, driven by a sharp fall in Chinese consumer spending and intensifying competition from lab-grown alternatives. The sector is only now beginning to emerge from what many in the industry consider its worst crisis in a generation. Speaking at a conference in London in June, De Beers CEO Al Cook described what he called a K-shaped market: larger, higher-quality natural diamonds seeing renewed demand and rising prices, while smaller, lower-quality stones remain stuck. The market has split. Lab grown dominates on volume at the affordable end. Natural diamonds, at the high end, are holding on provenance, scarcity, and the weight they carry for the buyer.
A seat at the table
The Global Diamond Consortium that Richemont and Signet are negotiating to join is led by Gareth Penny, who ran De Beers from 2006 to 2010 and built his career inside the rough diamond procurement system that underpins the trade. Its core members are Diarough and Pluczenik, two of Antwerp’s most powerful diamond trading houses, alongside the sovereign governments of Angola and Namibia — two of the world’s largest diamond-producing nations. What makes this investment group significant beyond the acquisition itself is that it already contains the entire midstream pipeline. What Richemont and Signet are asking to join is a bid to control the supply chain from mine to market.
For Richemont, securing a stake gives the group real leverage over diamond sourcing, placing it right where key decisions are made. In practice, that could allow Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels to lay claim to the rarest, highest-quality stones before they ever hit the open market. It also aligns seamlessly with Richemont’s long-term strategy. Under South African billionaire Johann Rupert, the luxury house has maintained a strict, unwavering stance against using lab-grown diamonds in any of its collections. Cartier has cited publicly the absence of provenance and heritage as its reason. Richemont’s potential participation has been described as strategically meaningful, driven more by positioning in the natural diamond market than by financial return. A mining stake, in other words, is how that position becomes permanent.
Signet Jewelers’ calculation is different. The owner of Kay, Zales and Jared — three of the largest jewelry retail chains in the United States — is after volume security and supply pricing advantage. Different ends, same means.
What could still go wrong
The deal is far from done. Both Richemont and Signet declined to comment on the story, with Richemont passing on media requests entirely. Sources familiar with the matter say talks are ongoing, but nothing is locked in yet. There is still no agreement on whether a stake will be taken, how big it might be, or when a decision will be made.
The scale of any investment is also likely to be limited. The consortium already includes two sovereign governments, multiple private investors, and the leading Antwerp trading houses. Whatever Richemont and Signet take will represent a minority position — real enough to secure influence at the sourcing level but not control.
Botswana’s position may be the most important open question in the entire transaction. Its relationship with De Beers operates on two distinct levels. The first is operational: through Debswana, a 50/50 joint venture between the Botswana government and De Beers, the two parties jointly own and operate the diamond mines on Botswana’s soil, including two of the most productive in the world. The second is financial: independently of Debswana, Botswana holds a 15% direct shareholding in De Beers Group, the parent company, built up through successive negotiations with Anglo American over decades. The question at hand is what happens to that stake in the context of the sale. Will Botswana maintain it, will it negotiate an increase, or will it sell. Bloomberg has reported that discussions around a potential increase to around 25% are underway. Those negotiations are happening separately, outside the consortium, and how they conclude will shape the final ownership structure considerably, as well as the direction of the diamond trade.
Finally, a luxury conglomerate whose flagship brands are among the world’s largest consumers of high-quality natural diamonds taking an upstream stake in the company that mines and allocates those very stones raises supply chain conflict questions that competition regulators could, at some point, take an interest in.
The real play
The diamond industry has spent the better part of three years watching lab-grown stones take volume at the affordable end of the market without mounting an effective response. What this deal suggests, if it closes, is that the response was never going to come from marketing campaigns or consumer education. It was going to come from ownership.
At its peak, De Beers controlled roughly 80% of the world’s rough diamond supply, dictating who could buy, in what quantities, and at what price. That system no longer exists in its original form. What the Global Diamond Consortium represents — with its Antwerp trading houses, its producing nation governments, and now potentially one of the world’s most powerful luxury jewelry groups — is an attempt to rebuild that kind of control. And this time, the brands that depend most on natural diamond scarcity are part of the diamond trade system.
