World's largest diamond consumers

As many of you probably know African countries, together with Canada, Russia, and Australia make the group of top producing diamond countries. But what about major diamond consumers? Which countries consume majority of the world's rough diamond production?

Traditionally world's largest diamond consumer is United States. United States has negligent domestic diamond production but more than makes up for this as the world's largest diamond consumer. Some experts say that United States have good potential for diamond production too but currently U.S. is only considered as top diamond consumer.

The data for the diamond consumption in United States shows that in 2005 United States have imported around 1,060,000 carats of rough diamonds, majority African diamonds from Botswana and South Africa. Rough diamonds import from other countries looks really small when we compare it to total import of cut diamonds. Data from 2005 shows that United States accounted in 2005 for total cut diamond import of somewhere around 17,000,000 carats, these diamonds mostly came from India, Israel and Belgium (countries that are traditionally known as the best in diamond cutting business).

In the last couple of years new countries have appeared as top diamond consumers, most notably China, India and many expect Russia in years to come. China and India owe this diamond consuming trend to tremendous growth of their economies, and bigger life standard of their population, not to mention the fact that 2 billion people live in these two countries, so diamond market in these countries could really only grow in future.

If we take a look at the China we can see that diamond demand is becoming much bigger compared to gold demand which is lately experiencing decline. What else to say than that the people are far more attracted by these shiny stones that make ultimate pieces of jewelry. Big economic growth has turned China into the fifth largest diamond consumer in the world, with sales soaring from US$230 million in 1995 to US$1.2 billion in 2007. Many agree that if current trend is to continue China will soon overtake the US as the largest diamond consumer market, in a matter of years. Diamonds were first in China connected with luxury but now diamond consumption is changing from luxurious to more habitual consumption. China is also slowly but surely catching India as the top diamond cutting country mostly because of skilled, and most importantly cheap labor force, and currently there are more than 25,000 people working in China's diamond industry.

It has to be also said that big part of produced diamonds finds its place in different industries (industrial diamonds), and only about one fifth of totally produced diamonds end up in different diamond jewelry. More and more industries are in the need of diamonds, and even if by any chance diamond jewelry lose its attractiveness world diamond consumption would remain big.

World industrial diamond consumption should increase in years to come too. Especially since costs of industrial diamond production is likely to significantly decrease on global level due to low-cost producers like China and Russia.