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Russia’s Alrosa (MCX:ALRS), the world’s top diamond producer by output, is concerned about the increasing threat than cheaper man-made gems entering the supply chain represent to those who mine the real thing.
Speaking to clients and partners at the September Hong Kong Jewellery & Gem fair, the company said it is becoming imperative for the industry to find effective ways to defend the market from illegal substitutions by synthetic gems that are passed off as real diamonds.
While the diamond industry needs to protect itself from attempts to sell synthetic diamonds as natural ones, Alrosa doesn’t want to start a battle between the two sides.
“The basis [for protecting the diamond industry] is the disclosure of the information about diamond production and further movement of rough and polished diamonds to end consumers,” Galina Platonova, adviser to Alrosa’s President, told the audience.
A critical aspect of this protection, she said, is to secure that consumers prefer natural diamond jewellery to mock alternatives, and to develop and manufacture devices to easily identify natural and synthetic polished diamonds.
In recent years, diamond miners have seen the rise of man-made gems entering the supply chain with some producers accusing those synthetic stones of weighing in their reduced sales of late.
Technological leaps have allowed companies to make larger numbers of gem-quality stones inexpensively, with traders able to attempt to pass them off as mined, or natural, diamonds.
To avoid that increasing problem, Alrosa also said that is developing a series of programs aimed to highlight the value of Russian polished diamonds and to promote ALROSA’s brand.
Comments
HarBout
Although I agree with Alrosa regarding the necessity to disclose the origin of the diamond, ie. natural/mined or laboratory grown, I do not agree with the suggestion that Lab-grown diamonds are not real diamonds, as they have the same properties as mined diamonds and are in fact for the larger, CVD-grown diamonds, potentially more pure than the mined ones. In fact the word diamond designates a certain form of carbon cristallization and as such represents a material. As both mined diamonds and lab-grown diamonds are “diamond” the only way to distinguish them is by adding their origin.