For more than a decade, reports from Bain & Company have been widely cited by journalists, investors and the diamond industry as authoritative analysis of natural-diamond supply, demand, pricing, scarcity and laboratory-grown diamonds.
Bain & Company produced its widely read diamond industry reports often in association with the Antwerp World Diamond Centre. These reports provided a seeming “third party”, “independent” view of De Beers’ messaging of diamond supply scarcity, etc. It concludes “New natural diamond supply remains limited.”
Bain was not merely an outside observer of the diamond industry. It had previously been hired by De Beers to help fundamentally redesign De Beers itself.
A forecast prepared for the natural-diamond industry's principal trading organization should not automatically be presented to consumers as though it were independent academic evidence about the future scarcity or investment value of natural diamonds.