January 2023 | Lab Grown Magazine

January 2023 | The Lab Grown Diamond Resource Book 20 Mailed to 24,000 Jewelers Monthly - To advertise call (888) 832-1109 | January 2023 21 lobal diamond dominance is led by a single country. That country could be China or India. While natural diamond export charts show India as the clear leader, the lab-grown diamond global market share swings strongly to China. At fifty-six percent of the market, China dominates over India’s current fifteen percent. But power shifts do occur, typically when the leading side sits down. China is known to outperform when it comes to performance. China’s successful diamond businesses bank on highly competitive implementation on repeat. The country’s quality output has been in question at times, but the effectiveness of getting the job done - on time and on budget - is a historic hallmark for China. That is, until the Chinese government shut its international borders to help control the Covid-19 outbreak. Closing borders meant closing business for many Chinese-based operations. After three years of a police enforced country- wide lockdown, the restrictive zero-Covid policy set-up by the Chinese government was recently lifted. But the lift is dramatically slow. Beijing, where the virus remained under control until the Winter of 2022, when China experienced Covid cases multiplying at a dizzying rate. Sickness has affected employee productivity, already at a deeply reduced rate, due to forced isolation if a virus detection is noted. Since China’s Covid screening policy was dropped on December 7, 2022, the Omicron variant picked-up its cotangent factor, and unfortunately hit the Chinese hard and often. Yet, “where one door closes, another opens,” as the saying goes. The country best leveraging that open door is India. In 2021, India was the largest exporter of diamonds worldwide, amounting to a total value of $24.7 billion. This, compared to the nearly $15 billion of diamond value exported by the United States that year, ranked second. DIAMOND EXPORT VALUE WORLDWIDE BY COUNTRY: 2021