The De Beers Collapse: $6.8 Billion Written Down, a Monopoly Undone

The modern diamond market was not discovered; it was engineered. In 1947 De Beers and its advertising agency wrote four words, A Diamond Is Forever, and over the following decades built the belief that a diamond was rare, eternal, and the only acceptable token of engagement. Scarcity was managed, supply was controlled, and price was defended. For most of the twentieth century it worked. The myth was the product. In 2026 the myth is what is failing, because the one thing it depended on, the idea that a diamond is rare, is no longer true.

A lab grown diamond is a diamond: same carbon, same crystal structure, same optics, graded on the same 4Cs by the same labs. The only difference is that it is grown in weeks rather than mined over a billion years. Once production scaled, the scarcity that justified the price disappeared. Wholesale lab grown prices fell roughly 74 percent between 2020 and 2025, per Edahn Golan Diamond Research, and a finished lab stone now costs 80 to 90 percent less than its mined equivalent, per BriteCo. By 2025 lab grown made up more than 45 percent of US engagement ring purchases. The monopoly was not outsold; it was made obsolete by a furnace.

De Beers' own answer made the point for it. In 2018 it launched Lightbox, a lab grown jewelry brand priced low to signal that lab stones were cheap costume pieces. The market disagreed, the price of lab grown kept falling, and in 2025 De Beers announced it would close Lightbox entirely. The company had created a lab grown brand to discredit lab grown, and the category outgrew it anyway.

The collapse is written in Anglo American's own accounts. Over three consecutive years it wrote down the value of De Beers by a combined $6.8 billion: $1.6 billion in 2023, $2.9 billion in 2024, and $2.3 billion in 2025. The carrying value fell from over $4 billion to $2.3 billion. In 2025 the business posted an underlying EBITDA loss of $511 million, widening from a $25 million loss the year before. These are not the figures of a cyclical dip. They are the figures of a business model losing its foundation.

Anglo American has decided De Beers is no longer core and is working to sell or spin it off, a separation it has said should complete in the first half of 2026. Finding a buyer for a business losing money in a structurally declining category, with the Government of Botswana holding 15 percent and controlling access to key supply, has proven difficult. A trade buyer would inherit the same headwinds; a public listing depends on a market that has watched three straight years of writedowns. The asset that once underwrote the entire industry is now the one its owner most wants to leave.

For buyers, the collapse of the monopoly is the best news in a century. The same diamond that once carried a managed, defended price now costs 80 to 90 percent less when grown in a lab, with an identical IGI certificate. The premium you used to pay was for a story, not a stone. Buy the certificate and the cut, not the marketing. Every Draco piece is IGI certified, E to F color, VS2 clarity or better, priced to the 4Cs in CAD. See what the same diamond costs without the monopoly in the lab versus natural price comparison, or browse certified rings.