De Beers will cease creating synthetic diamonds for its Lightbox consumer brand in a strategic revamp that will also see it manufacture and sell natural polished. “We believe the value of lab-grown diamonds lies in technology rather than in jewelry,” De Beers CEO Al Cook said Friday at the company’s JCK Las Vegas breakfast event.
The miner’s Element Six business will streamline its three chemical vapor deposition (CVD) plants, merging them all into its $94 million facility in Portland, Oregon. That plant will pivot into a technology hub that produces diamonds for industrial applications, executives explained.
De Beers aims to make Element Six into “the leader in synthetic-diamond technology solutions,” Cook said. “This starts with concentrating all our resources in a single world-class CVD hub.”
The announcement calls time on De Beers’ six-year experiment of producing its own lab-grown diamonds for the Lightbox jewelry line, which launched in 2018. Prior to that, Element Six had been synthesizing diamonds for industrial and research purposes.
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