Diamond crash 2025: supply, closure and price signals for mine planners
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on MINING.com
30 Second Briefing
Diamond mining was hit hard in 2025 as De Beers reported a steep revenue fall, accumulated about $2 billion in unsold natural stones and moved to cut over 1,000 jobs while Anglo American advanced plans to sell the business and merge with Teck Resources. Russia’s Alrosa saw profits drop nearly 80% and halted operations at key sites, while smaller miners entered administration or closed pits as lab-grown diamonds eroded prices. Botswana’s Debswana will cut output by up to 40% in 2025, and producers under the Luanda Accord pledged 1% of annual revenues to a global marketing push for natural stones.
Technical Brief
- De Beers’ parent Anglo American plans to divest the unit while pursuing a merger with Teck Resources.
- Alrosa’s ~80% profit collapse triggered suspension of operations at several unspecified “key sites” in Russia.
- Multiple unnamed junior diamond miners have gone into administration or fully closed pits as margins vanished.
- De Beers has shut down its Lightbox lab-grown jewellery brand, reallocating spend to natural-diamond marketing.
- Under the Luanda Accord, signatories must ring‑fence 1% of diamond revenues for collective promotion.
- Botswana, as Africa’s largest natural diamond exporter, now faces rising unemployment and fiscal stress from reduced sales.
- Debswana’s planned 2025 output cut responds directly to both weak demand and lab‑grown price competition.
- Analysts link demand weakness to luxury slowdown in China and oversupply of synthetics, not only Western sentiment shifts.
Our Take
With Debswana signalling output cuts of up to 40% in Botswana while Alrosa in Russia faces an 80% profit plunge, our database suggests African producers may gain relative bargaining power in Luanda Accord marketing decisions as Russian supply becomes less commercially flexible.
The NovaAndino Litio JV controlling Atacama salar lithium through to 2060 places Chile’s Atacama desert in the same long-horizon strategic bracket as key battery-metals assets we track, meaning Anglo American and Teck Resources’ portfolio choices will increasingly be judged against lithium returns rather than legacy diamond exposure.
Among the 15 diamond-tagged pieces in our coverage, this is one of the few that explicitly links diamond market distress with lithium growth in Chile, underscoring how capital may rotate from mature luxury commodities into long-duration energy-transition projects in the Atacama salar.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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