De Beers sparkles in first half of 2010

Most people in the diamond business take a fairly casual interest in the ups and downs of De Beers.

Gone are the days when De Beers accounted for 80% or 90% of global rough diamond supply (it’s around 40-45% today), and in fact most people in the world of diamonds and jewellery don’t actually do any business with De Beers anyway.

That’s because the diamond mining giant sells its rough diamonds to a limited number (less than 100) of diamond cutting companies who then distribute the polished diamonds on to jewellers and retailers around the world.

But my background at De Beers means I still pay more attention than most, so when De Beers published their interim results for 2010 last week I took some time to study the results and to read the extensive press coverage that they generated over the weekend.

Rightly or wrongly, the result that usually leads the story is the top line number for Sales.

2009 was something of an annus horribilis for De Beers and for many in the diamond business (De Beers almost stopped mining for a while: diamond production dropped by over 90% in the first three months of the year), so analysts were looking for something of a rebound in 2010.

And as the chart below shows, sales of rough diamonds by De Beers did bounce back well in the first half of 2010. They’re not yet back to the $3+ billion figures seen in the pre-crisis years of 2006-2008, but 2010 is a marked improvement on the disastrous sales result from early 2009.

De Beers H1 rough diamond sales 2006-2010; source www.debeersgroup.com

On the back of improved sales over the last six months De Beers also pumped up its diamond production, which leapt from 6.6 million carats in H1 2009 to 15.4 million carats in H1 2010.

Looking forward, much now depends upon how those diamonds move through the ‘diamond pipeline’ – they still have some distance to travel once they’ve left the vaults at De Beers.

Diamonds often take months to cut & polish, and then there’s onward trading of polished diamonds (they can change hands several times), setting into jewellery, international distribution, more trading… all before they appear for sale on retailers’ shelves in time for the key Christmas season in the USA – the world’s largest diamond market.

So improved sales for rough diamonds in early 2010 is an encouraging portent as the industry restocks with diamonds following last year’s slump, but that optimism will be tempered by caution and anxiety about just how strong the recovery will prove to be at retail/consumer level.

Uncertainty over the recovery of demand in the US is offset by optimism about sustained demand growth in emerging markets such as India, and more particularly, China. But only up to a point: the US accounts for around 50% of global diamond consumption, and China might be growing fast, but it’s not yet even 10% of global demand.

Back to De Beers. I was impressed by something else in the figures: Net Earnings.

De Beers has cut its costs aggressively over the last 18 months and this has shown up in the figures in a striking way. Net Earnings (before special items) for the half year were regularly topping $300 million before the financial crisis took hold, but in 2009 earnings almost completely dried up – they were just $3m for the first half of the year, as shown below.

De Beers H1 Net Earnings 2006-2010; source www.debeersgroup.com

But look at the impressive rebound in 2010: Net Earnings are back up to $300m+, and those earnings have been generated from a fairly modest (in historical terms) sales figure.

So the tough medicine of slashing costs has worked: De Beers is generating cash once again – impressive cash for its current level of sales – allowing it to pay down some of its considerable debt and to begin to repay the shareholder loans that it took on to survive through the darkest days of last year’s slump in demand for its product.

The financial crisis took De Beers to the edge of the abyss, but it’s done what all good businesses should do in such circumstances: it turned the crisis into an opportunity. De Beers grasped the opportunity to look at its costs and it’s emerged from the crisis leaner, fitter, and better able to compete as the recovery gathers pace.

De Beers CEO Resigns

Perhaps even more eyecatching and surprising than the upbeat results last week was the news that De Beers CEO, Gareth Penny, is to step down by the end of the year.

Penny has been at De Beers for 22 years and has run the company for the last 5 years. I should declare something of a personal interest here: I worked for Gareth for most of the last decade and I acted as his personal assistant for a period in 2003-2004.

The diamond industry has – in my experience – always been fairly conservative, traditional, and family-based (De Beers is still part-owned and run by the Oppenheimer family). In some ways of course, that’s a strength rather than a weakness.

Change tends to come slowly to De Beers and to the diamond industry. Perhaps that’s inevitable in a business that deals with a product that’s up to 4 billion years old: A diamond is forever, after all.

But the rate of change within the diamond business has increased over the last decade. Not everybody signed up to the changes – they never do – and no doubt some wrong turns were taken in the chaos and upheaval created by the new environment.

Gareth Penny has been at the forefront of the changes that have come to De Beers and to the diamond industry in recent years.

He led a major strategic review at De Beers a decade ago – a review that guided De Beers out from behind the iron curtain of monopolistic practices – and the repercussions of that review are still being felt by the company and by the industry.

For the industry, it meant that many diamond businesses were encouraged to turn around, to look downstream to face consumers rather than upstream to worship at the feet of De Beers.

As a result, lots of money was wasted on ill-conceived marketing initiatives: not every business can or should be involved in consumer marketing. Many businesses in the middle of the diamond pipeline know that their strength is in understanding the needs of their immediate customers rather than trying to understand and reach consumers half a world away.

But lots of money is wasted on ill-conceived marketing initiatives by lots of companies in all industries. And just because some diamond companies invested in some pretty dodgy marketing schemes completely lacking in consumer appeal – well, let’s just say that it became a little too easy, predictable and routine to blame De Beers for one’s own strategic errors.

For De Beers, Gareth Penny’s legacy has included a much greater focus on social responsibility (which in turn changed the broader industry, although there is much still to do, viz Zimbabwe), and also a newfound zeal for legal compliance which led to important deals with the European Commission and the US Department of Justice (although class action suits continue to cause trouble for De Beers in the US).

Penny played a major role in dragging a monopolistic 120+ year old company into the 21st century, and his policies changed not just De Beers but also impacted upon the wider diamond and jewellery industries.

His last couple of years at De Beers were dominated by steering the company through the financial crisis, something he seems to have done remarkably well, but I suspect he would rather be remembered for the profound strategic changes that he launched a decade ago than for the cost-cutting of the recent past.

Well, we can’t always choose our legacy, and in any event, Gareth Penny has chosen to quit whilst he’s ahead, and that’s not a bad thing to do.

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Wedding Photographer Fail

Well, there are lots of these kinds of wedding videos around – many of them faked – and they’re all a bit 1990s-cheesy in a You’ve Been Framed kind of way, but we quite like this one and it appears to be genuine.

Well, it made us laugh.

Pity about the expensive camera equipment though.

original post here

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500 million Facebookers is impressive, but not unique

Facebook announced this week that 500 million people are now actively using their social network.

Well that's something like 1 in every 14 people on the planet, which is jolly impressive.

But it got me thinking... what other organisation has 500 million active members/participants/customers?

And it turns out, in my totally unscientific and unresearched analysis, that there are quite a few such organisations.

The first one that occurred to me is the Indian Railways. With a population of around 1.2 billion, I expect that most Indians have at some time used their extensive railway system, and when you add in the numbers from previous generations over the last 100+ years, the total number of unique users of Indian Railways must be getting on for 1 billion or more (although the inter-generational thing is a bit of a cheat: they can't really be described as 'active' users - the phrase used by Facebook).

Next: France. Huh? Yes, really, and here's my dodgy logic: France is the most visited country in the world, with an annual number of international arrivals of around 75 million people.

So in less than a decade, France as a 'product' will be experienced by more than 500 million people (in addition to the actual French, obviously).

Granted: that's not 500 million unique users because lots of visitors return to France time and again, but I reckon that there must be at least 500 million people around the world who have visited France at least once.

Not convinced? OK then, how about this one: Islam. Actually, not just Islam but also Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, all of which are estimated to have at least 500 million adherents.

What else? Well, there must be some products that are consumed or experienced by hundreds of millions of people, right?

Now here I really don't have the time or the patience to do much research, but I'm confident that Coca Cola falls into this category (4 billion drinkers, apparently), plus I think McDonald's, who claim to serve more than 47 million people around the world every day, so that would ratchet up to 500 million quite quickly.

My guess is that over 500 million people have driven or ridden in a Toyota vehicle, fitted a General Electric bulb, smoked a Marlboro cigarette, and made a cup of Nescafe.

And in the world of entertainment, more than half a billion people probably have seen a Disney or Tom Cruise movie, or bought a Beatles or Madonna record.

Every day more than 500 million people must use Microsoft software or search Google, and just this month the best part of a billion tuned into the FIFA World Cup final.

So 500 million users for Facebook merely signals the arrival of the social network as a Division 1 global brand alongside many others with which we are all familiar.

But there is something special (and slightly scary) about Facebook which sets it apart from all the others...

How many of the companies and organisations that I've mentioned above know your name, where you live, your date of birth, your family connections, your interests, preferences and passions, your network of friends and the friends of your friends?

We don't log on and update our personal details every time we buy a Coke or eat a Big Mac, but we do just that when we visit Facebook.

Think about the power of that: our most intimate details willingly submitted to a private company.

Imagine the value of all that information to advertisers, including the companies mentioned above.

And imagine that the database of users features the wealthiest and most connected, the impossible-to-reach but influential and important youth market, and millions of people in major emerging markets such as India.

That's the power of Facebook, and that's why 500 million users is an important milestone.

Who knows where it will end?

Oh, and one last thing: check out our Facebook page.

You can visit the Diamondthrills Blog here and read the original post here

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How to cheer up Britain

Recession. Cuts. Unemployment. World Cup #fail. A deranged gunman on the loose. Sometimes it seems like there’s nothing but bad news out there.

Well at least the sun’s shining – for now.

But we need something else to cheer us up and we’ve hit upon an idea:

Let’s have a royal wedding.

It’s been a while since we had a good one (the Peter Phillips + Canadian joint venture in 2008 didn’t really hit the spot) and the gloss has long since faded from those failed 1980s mergers between Charles & Diana and Andrew & Fergie.

So let’s have the one that the 21st Century has been waiting for: William & Kate.

They’ve teased us for long enough: we’ve had too many false reports, and we’ve even had pictures of (fake) Kate wearing a wedding dress.

Besides, what exactly is the Royal Family for if it can’t arrange a glitzy royal wedding once in a generation?

Our new coalition government is pulling out all the stops to try to turn the economy around, but perhaps the Prime Minister & Chancellor should have a word with the boy William and ask him to do the nation a favour and tie the knot on a date which is positive for the economic cycle, i.e. as soon as bloody possible, please.

When the city of Stockholm hosted the wedding of Swedish Crown Princess Victoria last month there were reports that for every $1 spent on the wedding, $100 would be generated for the economy.

Now that’s the sort of fiscal stimulus that we need: let’s spend £100m on a royal wedding and generate £10 billion for our economy. I reckon that would add around 0.6% to the UK’s GDP of £1.75 trillion.

There, that’s fixed it.

Now I’m sure that those Swedes put on a good show for their Big Day, but when it comes to the consumption of mountains of tatty Royal Wedding merchandise such as the indispensable Will & Kate Tea Towel and the Will & Kate Keyring, I’m confident that Britain still leads the world.

Plus of course there’s the boost from tourism as people flock to the streets of London from around the country and around the world in even greater numbers than usual, all prepared to pay for overpriced hotel rooms and about £5 for a small bottle of tepid water as they wait around for hours along the procession route through the capital waving their union flags.

And what marvellous sponsorship opportunities!

This will be the first really big royal wedding in the modern era, so like the World Cup or the Olympics, there must be a wacky mascot and an official logo for the event.

The Will & Kate logo will be expensively licensed out to Official Partners, including the Official Credit Card, the Official Cola, the Official Beer, and the Official Airline of the Royal Wedding.

A Royal Wedding will boost the media businesses too: the TV companies will cover it like they’ll cover the 2012 Olympics (which means that the two events can’t clash, so that’s another great reason not to wait until 2012), and a billion trees will be pulped to publish glossy special souvenir supplements with every newspaper and magazine.

There will be street parties with beer & bunting, and sales of 3D-TVs will get a boost, and copycat engagements & weddings will generate business for lots of people like us…

And lastly and perhaps most importantly, the Royal Wedding will add to the nation’s ‘General Well-Being’ (remember that?). It’ll put a smile on our face and make us feel like the sunlit uplands are finally within our grasp.

And the dwindling number of republicans will grumble and moan and write angry letters to the Guardian.

And then, when all is done, we’ll have an almighty hangover.

Original post here.

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Diamonds and Zimbabwe

I was jogging on a treadmill at the gym last week when I spotted images of diamonds on Sky News on one of the club TVs.

Now diamonds don’t make it onto the mainstream news channels too often so I hurriedly tuned in so that I could watch and listen to the report.

The subject was the meeting of something called the ‘Kimberley Process’, taking place in Israel last week, and more specifically the diamond industry response to what’s been happening in Zimbabwe.

A bit of background: like most of its neighbours, Zimbabwe is a diamond-producing country, but not a major one in global terms.

When industry website IdexOnline published its overview of the 2009 diamond ‘pipeline’ earlier this year it estimated that Zimbabwe produced around 2.5 million carats of diamonds at a value of perhaps $80 million – that’s just less than 1% of their estimate of the total value of global production last year of £8.46 billion.

Now Zimbabwe might be producing rather more than that – it’s hard to tell (of which more in a moment).

But then again last year was a lean year for diamond production because major producers such as De Beers cut back massively, wisely deciding that if they were going to struggle to sell the diamonds then they would be better off leaving them in the ground.

According to Idex, global production in 2008 was $14.8 billion, in which case this ‘theoretical’ Zimbabwe production of $80m would be around 0.5% of the global total.

Zimbabwe’s production is so hard to quantify because of the failings of both the Zimbabwe regime and the Kimberley Process.

The Kimberley Process was set up by the diamond industry and relevant governments and NGOs to stem the flow of conflict diamonds – the sort of thing that was depicted in the movie Blood Diamond starring Leonardo DiCaprio and set in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s when that country was ravaged by civil war.

The Kimberley Process has scored some notable successes over the last decade but it has failed in respect of Zimbabwe, and that’s partly because what’s been going on there is not a civil war or a ‘conflict’ in the same sense that conflicts took place in Zaire (now DR Congo), Angola, and Sierra Leone.

But the absence of an overt conflict in Zimbabwe does not mean that all is well there in the diamond trade – far from it.

You can find the gory details elsewhere, but there have been credible reports of killings by security forces, forced labour, child labour, and the imprisonment of a human rights activist.

And it almost goes without saying that the brutal Mugabe regime is mixed up in all this, with allegations that people around Mugabe are profiting handsomely from the nation’s lucrative diamond resources.

The response from the Kimberley Process regulators was to ban exports of diamonds from Zimbabwe, and they helpfully circulated images of uncut diamonds from Zimbabwe (below) to help traders recognise them.

Rough diamonds from Marange in Zimbabwe

But of course diamonds are all too easy to smuggle, and nobody believes that banned Zimbabwe diamonds are not leaking out into the legitimate diamond trade where unscrupulous traders (and there too many of those…) will mix these illicit diamonds into parcels of diamonds from legitimate sources.

To make things worse, the Zimbabwe Government brazenly declared this week that it planned to sell its considerable diamond stockpiles anyway, regardless of the Kimberley Process ban.

Meanwhile the regulators meeting in Israel failed to agree on a way forward, so the meeting ended in deadlock and the issue was kicked into the long grass until their next meeting to be held in St Petersburg.

Why are we telling you all this?

Well you probably won’t hear about this sort of thing on other consumer-facing diamond & jewellery websites, and if you walk into a jewellery boutique they’re unlikely to volunteer this information to you; if you do ask them about Zimbabwe and diamonds they’ll most likely look at you blankly because they don’t know enough to comment or to offer you convincing reassurance.

The diamond industry doesn’t like to shine a light on its own shortcomings (who does?), and of course the risk for the industry is that consumers recoil from diamonds altogether and choose to spend their precious cash on something else.

We know this, but we believe that people want and deserve more and more transparency about the products that they buy (or rent!), so we’re prepared to learn as much as we can about what’s going on in places like Zimbabwe, and to write about it so that you have accurate information and can make an informed decision.

The diamond industry is embarrassed by Zimbabwe and would like to solve the problem, but politics and bureaucracy and conflicting interests and corruption prevent that from happening, and the Kimberley Process seems impotent and unable to come up with the answers.

In a way, they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t, and we don’t envy them their task.

If exports from Zimbabwe are resumed then the revenues from diamond sales will flow into the hands of the brutal Mugabe regime and the industry will be seen to approve of – or at least tolerate – the conditions in which the diamonds are being mined.

But under the export ban diamonds are leaking out of the country anyway, revenues are ending up in many of the same corrupt hands, and conditions on the ground don’t improve.

Meanwhile, the violence and lawlessness of the Marange diamond fields ensure that Zimbabwe continues to be an affront to democracy and a stain on both the diamond industry and the Kimberley Process.

It doesn’t matter that it’s only 0.5% or 1% of world diamond production. Diamonds are emotive and women buy or wear diamond jewellery because of how it makes them feel.

Zimbabwe is an important test for the Kimberley Process and last week it failed that test.

We just thought you should know.

original post here

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Will this improve the iPhone 4g’s reception?

Oh dear. These novelty diamond things just keep on coming.

It’s been barely a week since the launch of the iPhone 4g, but that hasn’t deterred Stuart Hughes from smearing one with diamonds.

Classy

This little gem features around 6.5 carats of VVS clarity / F colour diamonds, with the Apple logo on the back fashioned out of platinum and studded with diamonds.

A limited edition of ‘just 50′ will be made, according to Hughes’ website, so hurry along now and snap one up for £12,995.

Quite what you do with your £13,000 iPhone 4g when it becomes obsolescent in 12-18 months time… well, we could make a few suggestions.

Oh, and in case you’re balancing on a knife edge of indecision about buying one of these beauties, it comes with a very special accessory: a wallet made from an Ostrich’s foot. At some point we’re going to start believing that this is satire dreamt up by The Daily Mash…

We can think of a few England footballers who deserve one of these – it’s about as classy as their performance at the World Cup.

Hat-tip to Gizmondo.

Original post here.

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