De Beers Group expects to end all consumer-oriented Lightbox brand activities in the summer of 2025 and shut down all operations of the entire brand before the end of 2025.
On May 8, De Beers Group, a natural diamond miner and retailer, announced that it planned to close its diamond jewelry brand Lightbox. In the process, De Beers Group is discussing the sale of related assets including inventory with potential buyers.
De Beers Group's exclusive response to the interface news said that it is expected to end all consumer-oriented Lightbox brand activities in the summer of 2025 and shut down all operations of the Lightbox brand before the end of 2025. During this period, the sales activities of the Lightbox brand will continue. After discussion with potential buyers, the final remaining Lightbox product inventory will be sold together.
In June 2024, De Beers Group announced that it would stop cultivating diamonds for the Lightbox brand production laboratory and focus on the higher-priced natural diamond business.
Zhu Guangyu, a senior diamond industry analyst, told Interface News: "In fact, after the news that it stopped producing diamonds for jewelry in June last year came out, it was rumored in the industry that it would shut down this brand sooner or later. Because this is contrary to De Beers Group's own position in the natural diamond industry and its overall strategy. "
In February 2025, De Beers Group announced that it would launch a brand-new "Origins Strategy" by the end of May 2025, aiming at indirectly reducing the group's expenditure of 100 million US dollars (about RMB) through four major measures.
This includes focusing on projects with higher return rate, improving the delivery efficiency of the middle office of the enterprise, activating "category marketing" and focusing on the business of natural diamond high-grade jewelry, and its synthetic diamond manufacturer Element Six will focus on the application and solution of synthetic diamonds in industrial scenes.
It must be mentioned that Anglo American has been taking action to split and sell De Beers since 2024, because the diamond-related business is no longer the strategic focus of the former. At the end of September, 2024, Anglo American publicly stated in London that there was no possibility of reversal in the plan to sell De Beers. However, based on the weak performance of De Beers in the past two years, there is also news in the market that another practice of Anglo American Group is to split De Beers' business and list it separately.
De Beers Group tells us that the wholesale price of cultivating diamonds has fallen by 90% now. And its current pricing has "gradually approached the cost-plus model, which is decoupled from the price of natural diamonds."
The so-called "cost-plus pricing model" is a method of setting product prices by adding a certain percentage of profits to the unit cost. To put it simply, the characteristic of this pricing strategy is that the price of unified goods in the market will be relatively stable, but it will ignore the change of demand elasticity.
More importantly, De Beers Group terminated and planned to sell the cultivated diamond jewelry brand Lightbox, which greatly helped to end the scuffle between natural diamonds and cultivated diamonds that puzzled consumers in the past few years.
In recent years, the large-scale mass production of diamond jewelry and its rapid entry into the retail market have had an impact on the natural diamond jewelry retail market. However, the involvement of natural diamond head enterprises in the game of cultivating diamond terminal consumption has further confused the public's past cognition of diamond scarcity and questioned the value of diamonds.
By the end of December, 2024, the international average price of natural diamonds has dropped by 24% in one year due to the influence of macro-environment and weak consumer demand in China market.
(Imgs from Google)
Post time: May-10-2025