Anglo American writes down De Beers another $2.3bn

Anglo American has taken another axe to the book value of De Beers, writing down the diamond business by $2.3 billion (£1.7 billion) as the market for “forever” stones collides with a very mortal mix of weaker demand, tighter financing and credible substitutes.

According to the Evening Standard, the FTSE 100 miner posted a net loss of $3.7 billion for 2025, largely driven by the impairment. This is now the third De Beers write-down in three years, following impairments of $2.9 billion in 2024 and $1.6 billion in 2023. On an underlying basis, Anglo’s earnings ticked up 2% to $6.4 billion—an almost comic juxtaposition: the core business muddles through while the crown jewel keeps evaporating.

De Beers itself is bleeding. The group’s underlying loss widened to $511 million from $25 million the year before, with management blaming “challenging” rough-diamond trading conditions. Production was cut 12% last year, a familiar move for a cartel-adjacent business: if prices won’t cooperate, squeeze supply and pray that consumers keep confusing scarcity with value.

But the economics are shifting in ways that make the old playbook less effective. Lab-grown diamonds have moved from novelty to mainstream, offering near-identical physical properties with radically different cost curves. When a product can be manufactured on demand, the political and operational leverage of controlling mines diminishes—especially once consumers learn that “natural” is not a synonym for “rare,” but a marketing claim backed by decades of supply management.

The timing also matters for Anglo. Chief executive Duncan Wanblad said the company is “progressing the separation of De Beers,” the Evening Standard reports. Translation: Anglo wants out, but the market is setting the exit price. A forced seller meets a skeptical buyer base, and the spread shows up as impairments.

Complicating the story is Anglo’s wider corporate reshuffle. The company is preparing a $50 billion merger with Canada’s Teck Resources to create “Anglo Teck,” a copper-heavy giant, with shareholder approval already secured and regulatory approvals targeted through 2026, per the Evening Standard. Copper is the metal of electrification narratives and state-subsidised grid dreams; diamonds are a discretionary luxury increasingly exposed to income squeezes and a higher cost of capital.

The punchline is that even a century-old quasi-monopoly can’t legislate desire—nor can it stop technology from turning scarcity into a branding exercise. De Beers’ “value” is being marked to market, and the market is unimpressed.