Among the many reasons Anglo American gave for its willingness to pay $5bn for a majority stake in De Beers, the world’s biggest seller of diamonds, was the drastic shift it has helped bring about in Chinese wedding rituals.

Much has changed since the days when a bride’s worth was measured by the number of duvets her mother would supply the newly-wed couple.

When Cynthia Carroll, Anglo’s chief executive, announced the deal on Friday, she took a few minutes to talk about the “phenomenal job” De Beers had done marketing diamonds to emerging markets customers.

Carroll was referring principally to China, now the world’s second largest market.

It has taken De Beers twenty years to convince Chinese women that the number of carats in a diamond was not only a store of value equal to that of duvets, but also a symbol of love.

De Beers began low-level advertising campaigns in the 1990s, when couples first began to exchange rings at a wedding.

“In 1993 there wasn’t a single store in China where you could buy a diamond,” said Stephen Lussier, chief executive of De Beer’s Forevermark.

Making the link between love and diamonds was a tough sell at a time when most Chinese earned less in a year than the price of a solitaire ring, the diamond producer’s most basic single diamond.

Then ten years ago De Beers began to roll out its own retail outlets in Hong Kong and China, of which it now has 300. Back then, a diamond wedding ring went for $300 to $400 on average, Lussier said. Today the most similar basic wedding ring is sold, on average, for $2,400.

Andy Davidson, mining analyst at Numis, said the global outlook for diamonds was bullish thanks to high demand from emerging markets where they were being marketed as a lifestyle product.

“It does boil down to marketing, really. What use are diamonds… beyond their perceptive value? You’ve all been convinced by De Beers that diamonds are a girl’s best friend. In essence there is no reason why they should be.

“The Chinese and Indians value these even more than we do,” he said, adding that he didn’t think that this would change.

Diamond jewellers around the world have seen sales growth reaching double digit levels this year, in large part driven by demand from Asia. Anglo America estimates that India, China and the Gulf countries will represent 40 per cent of global demand for diamonds by 2015.

Source: blogs.ft.com