The headline on the front page of The Financial Times a couple of months ago read “De Beers braced for plunge in turnover”. The world’s biggest diamond miner, hit hard by the recession, was planning to halve its turnover in the year ahead, having already cut production by 40 per cent and mothballed its flagship mines in Botswana.
If that headline was not evidence enough of a bruised and battered diamond industry limping through the economic crisis, then sales figures from the other behemoths of the trade certainly were. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that “Tiffany & Co’s fiscal fourth-quarter net income dropped 76 per cent as sales plunged on extreme softness in the US and general sluggishness spread further to global markets,” while Bulgari, the world’s third-largest jeweller, announced revenues for the first quarter of 2009 down by 23 per cent from the first quarter of the previous year and a net loss of €29.3m ($41m). To rub salt in the De Beers wounds, Guy Leymarie, its CEO, announced his resignation at the end of last month.
