From Kimberley’s deep hole to De Beers’s deep difficulty

The Big Hole in Kimberley is the largest and deepest hand-dug excavation on earth (the holes at Jagersfontein and Bultfontein may actually be bigger, but let’s not spoil a good story).

That yawning pit, where as many fortunes were lost as made, is a 215m-deep metaphor for De Beers’s current dull sparkle. The mining company, founded in 1888 by The Capitalist Crusader, Cecil John Rhodes, is for sale as parent Anglo American continues to divest assets while fending off a BHP takeover.

The trouble for De Beers, as Forbes reports, is that the miner is apparently sitting on a $2bn stockpile of unsold stones, originally bought to remove excess from the market and prop up prices.

De Beers spent six years experimenting with manufactured diamonds but is shuttering that side of the business ahead of the sale

The company cost its parent nearly $3bn in 2024, a time one executive reportedly called “a bad year for rough diamonds”. Maybe what he really meant to say was that it was a rough year for bad diamonds, given what lab-grown diamonds have done to wild-caught stones.

De Beers spent six years experimenting with manufactured diamonds but is shuttering that side of the business ahead of the sale.

While artificial stones are cheaper to buy and come with fewer ethics issues, everyone knows they’re not those (intrinsically worthless) pretties forged in the heart of the earth and spat out in riverbeds or carved out of kimberlite pipes.

There will always be those who can afford to pay for “real”, no matter the price — somewhat like the patrons of the Fabulous Gourmet Club in the 1990 film The Freshman. The illegal, and thus highly nomadic, club offered its members the chance to eat endangered animals at eye-watering prices. The price for eating the last of a species? One million dollars.

The price for the last found stone? Who knows? Either way, it probably won’t deter a serious buyer. Because diamonds, apparently, are forever.