The Bain Diamond Report

‘The Bain diamond report’ is shorthand for the Global Diamond Industry Report, an annual study of the whole diamond supply chain produced by the management consultancy Bain & Company in partnership with the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC)¹. The series launched in 2011 with an edition subtitled ‘Lifting the Veil of Mystery’⁵ and continued roughly annually. It is the single most-cited source on diamond-industry structure because it does three things that no miner or retailer publication does: it reports across the entire chain (rough production, midstream cutting and polishing, and retail demand), it is consistent year to year so trends are comparable, and it is independent of any one mining company.

The report is the origin of the most-quoted figures in the lab-grown-versus-natural debate, in particular the ratio of lab-grown to natural prices at retail and wholesale. Those ratios are used as anchors throughout this site, with the important caveat that the latest published numbers are from the 2021-22 edition and the market has moved since.

The annual series has run since 2011. The most-cited editions, with verified titles, are below. The 2021-22 report is the eleventh annual report and the most recent one Bain has published.

Selected editions. The intervening years (2012-2017) each had an edition in the same series; the rows above are the ones most commonly cited and the ones whose titles are verified on Bain’s own insight pages¹³⁴⁵.

When a buyer or a news article cites ‘the Bain report’ on lab-grown pricing, they are almost always citing the price ratios from the 2021-22 edition. The exact sentence in that report is that ‘the average polished lab-grown retail price declined to 30% and the average wholesale price to 14% of natural prices, down from 35% and 20% in 2020’¹.

Two things matter when using these numbers. First, they are category averages across the whole market, not the price of any specific stone; a particular pairing at a particular retailer can sit well above or below the average. Second, they are a 2020-to-2022 snapshot. Lab-grown wholesale has fallen substantially further since then, by roughly ninety per cent from its 2018 level on the longer view (see Chapter 8), so the wholesale ratio in particular is now lower than the 14 per cent Bain last published.

As of mid-2026, Bain has not published an annual Global Diamond Industry Report since the 2021-22 edition. There is no ‘Bain 2023’, ‘Bain 2024’, or ‘Bain 2025’ diamond report. Citations to those years almost always trace back to one of three things: trade-press coverage that re-reports the 2021-22 figures, a one-off Bain commentary that is not part of the annual series, or a different publisher’s report being misattributed to Bain.

That gap matters because the diamond market has moved sharply since early 2022. Natural rough prices fell from their 2022 peak, lab-grown wholesale continued to compress, De Beers closed its Lightbox lab-grown brand in 2025, and Anglo American moved to separate De Beers. None of that is in the Bain report. For the current picture we rely on live sources instead, and keep them clearly separated from the Bain anchors.

The Bain report is the best single industry-wide benchmark, but it is co-produced with a trade body (AWDC) rather than as independent academic work, so it is strongest on hard supply-chain data and weakest where it forecasts demand or frames the outlook. The practical rule is to take the structural and pricing figures, the rough-trade flows, the retail and wholesale ratios, the share splits, as the best available, and to read the forward-looking commentary with the caution any industry-funded analysis warrants. Where this site quotes a Bain figure it names the edition and year, because ‘the Bain report says’ without a year is how stale numbers spread.

Where this fits in the reference

The full current market picture is in Chapter 9: Market Data. The lab-grown price timeline that puts the Bain ratios in context is in Chapter 8: Price History. The production-economics explanation for why the gap exists at all is in Chapter 7: Price Structure, and the complete citation index is on the Sources page.