CaratDown 96 percent, profits triple: China's lab-grown paradox
Henan's Power Diamond guides first-half net profit to 80–93 million yuan, nearly triple last year, on revenue almost doubling to about 450 million yuan — in a category whose wholesale prices have fallen 96 percent since 2018.
The lab-grown diamond price collapse is the most documented fact in the modern jewelry trade; the profitability of the companies causing it is the least.
Stop reading the 96 percent as an obituary; it is a cost curve, and cost curves have owners. The profits are consolidating with whoever runs the cheapest reactors and whoever owns the consumer brand — the middle, as ever, gets nothing.
For jewelers the practical read is stable: grown-diamond supply gets cheaper and more industrial from here, which makes margin discipline and honest two-tier positioning more valuable, not less.
IBoth halves of the paradox are true at once
Power Diamond, a manufacturer in China's Henan province, told investors this week to expect first-half net profit of 80 to 93 million yuan — nearly triple a year earlier — on revenue almost doubling to roughly 450 million yuan, per the South China Morning Post.
The company credits manufacturing-process breakthroughs and robust export growth, with the United States its largest source of demand.
IIA commodity on a technology curve rewards the cheapest producer
Both halves of the paradox are true at once. Wholesale lab-grown prices are down 96 percent since 2018, and this page has charted every leg of the fall.
But a commodity on a technology curve rewards the producer whose costs fall faster than the price — each reactor-efficiency gain lands directly in margin, and volume does the rest.
The global lab-grown market now runs about 127 billion yuan, or $18.8 billion, and analysts expect China to account for nearly two-thirds of world output by 2030, with Henan the industrial core. Power Diamond's guidance is what winning that race looks like in a filing.
IIIMoney is funding the consolidation, not fleeing it
The capital markets have noticed on both sides of the Himalayas. Limelight Diamonds, an Indian lab-grown producer, raised Rs 275 crore this week — flagged in the Association of Intelligent Diamond International's weekly review as a signal of investor appetite for grown-diamond manufacturing even as the natural sector contracts.
Money is not fleeing the category that crashed; it is funding the consolidation of it.
The natural industry's same-week split-screen was stark: De Beers pausing Venetia for two years and warning, in the SCMP's paraphrase, of protracted challenging conditions as the industry evolves.
The two supply chains are now running opposite playbooks — natural withholding carats to defend price, grown adding reactors to defend share — and both, on the current evidence, are rational.
Dubai's $41.7 billion year: the trade's center of gravity moves
Where the value still sits, even as the volume story goes industrial.
The trade, filed before the New York open.
Prices, tenders and the one story that moved the industry overnight. Ninety seconds.
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