Does De Beers’ Future Lie in Its Past?

By Rob Bates | February 17, 2026

Former De Beers CEO Gareth Penny’s 20-minute interview at last week’s Mining Indaba conference in South Africa has gone the jewelry industry equivalent of viral. It was shared on several WhatsApp groups and is now at over 2,000 views–which isn’t particularly surprising, considering that Penny is part of a consortium bidding for his old company.

One industry member who was impressed by the Penny interview wrote in an email to me, “He gets it.” Another person I heard from said Penny’s vision for a new De Beers sounded a lot like the old De Beers.

Penny is an extremely bright guy and astute businessman. (The former Rhodes scholar now chairs Ninety-One, Africa’s leading investment fund.) He is also, as the Indaba video shows, a persuasive speaker who knows how to articulate his ideas, which are—quite likely—far more extensive than what’s expressed in the interview. James Campbell, another De Beers veteran, may be correct when he said recently that Penny best fulfills all of De Beers’ needs for its new owner, including extensive knowledge of the diamond trade and expertise in diamond marketing. Surely, in a crisis, experience counts.

(All this assumes the new owners will want new management. Since a management change is not unusual in takeovers, and the company is currently struggling, that could certainly happen.)

In the Indaba interview, Penny—rightfully—stressed the important of partnerships. And his key insight that De Beers has to be “myopically focused on driving demand” is pretty much conventional wisdom. As Pandora’s former CEO Alexander Lacik once put it, all brand turnarounds begin “with understanding where we went wrong with the consumer.”

Such an effort typically requires a huge amount of funds; in the video, Penny mentioned a marketing investment of $200 million to $300 million. While welcome, that would be a serious burden on a financially challenged company’s bottom line.

I’m not quite on board with Penny’s emphasis on “De Beers’ leadership position.” At this point, I would argue that the industry needs more leaders, not fewer. The period when Alrosa and De Beers were both leading players in the industry felt a lot more vibrant than what we have now. Ever since Alrosa was sidelined following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, De Beers has become the dominant industry voice, in a way it hadn’t been since the early 2000s. It’s involved in almost every industry group and campaign. I’m not sure that’s healthy.

Penny said in the video that De Beers should, as in the old days, “carefully do the analysis and all the research in the four or five key markets and decide what the winning idea could be for this year, and then work together with its clients, with the producers, and the retailers in driving demand by that idea.”

But in the current age, it’s much harder than it used to be for companies to set trends. The media landscape is much more fragmented than it was in the heyday of De Beers’ “beacons.” Because of that, consumers get to watch what they want, and that means they increasingly call the shots. As former Natural Diamond Council CEO David Kellie noted, the best marketers try to reflect the public mood, which is constantly changing.

The diamond industry has certainly had a tough time finding its footing in today’s world. The old model died not because it wasn’t successful—it was—but because the world changed. Penny was one of the people who spearheaded that evolution.

There are many things the old De Beers did that present-day De Beers could learn from. But there also is much that simply can’t be brought back. Fortunately, Penny is smart enough to realize that. Whoever takes over De Beers has a huge job ahead, as they try to adapt a business model formed in the 19th and early 20th centuries for the 21st century.

(JCK file photo)