ALEX BRUMMER: Copper displaces diamonds as Anglo American puts De Beers up for sale

Diamonds have been at the heart of Anglo American since the modern company was founded by Ernest Oppenheimer nearly a century ago.

In an industry where brands stand for little, De Beers is the big exception.

The products have inspired generations of young people entering married life, and the gemstones remain the sparkling star of films and legends.

As glamorous as De Beers may have been, with its striking 1947 slogan ‘A diamond from a mine is forever’, the company is now for sale.

The appeal of diamonds has been surpassed by copper, a metal less valued than more decorative rivals such as platinum, silver and gold.

The push for a greener, carbon-free economy has changed all that.

Copper prices have risen 20 percent this year, reaching a record $11,000 per tonne this month.

Some traders predict a glorious future for the reddish metal, with its value perhaps quadrupling to $40,000 per tonne.

There is a history of speculators trying to make a fortune from copper. In the 1990s, Japanese bank Sumitomo lost $2.6 billion (£2 billion) at the hands of disgraced trader Yasuo Hamanaka.

The giants of the mining world are trying to double their stake in the metal. Anglo American’s proposed sale of De Beers, as it tries to defend itself against a three-pronged attack by Australian mining giant BNP, has everything to do with copper.

BNP’s three successive bids and talks with Anglo are all about taking control of four copper projects in Chile and Peru.

Copper’s conductivity makes it critical to the world as it moves toward more electric vehicles, solar power and nuclear power.

Copper mania has made De Beers and diamonds an orphaned asset in a mining world where metals are the real stars.

Sparklers hold a special place in Western culture, and De Beers has had a granite grip on supplies for decades.

It has been at the top of a trade dominated by the cutters and traders from the Hasidic Jewish community based in Hatton Garden in London, Antwerp and Tel Aviv.

A window into occlusion culture was recently provided by the Netflix series Rough Diamonds. Anglo’s ‘going it alone’ strategy calls for it to sell De Beers in the hope of raising up to £5 billion through a trade sale or by demerging and listing the shares in London.

The challenge for De Beers is how to preserve the rarity and cache of mined diamonds. Last year, Anglo wrote down the value of its diamond operation by £1.3 billion to £6 billion, while sales of its rough diamonds plummeted by 18 percent. Sales were hit by lower demand from the US and China.

The real villain of the piece is laboratory rocks. These laboratory diamonds are said to be virtually indistinguishable from their mined cousins ​​and have captured about 20 percent of the US market alone.

Danish jeweler Pandora is among fashion brands embracing the newcomer, which sells for a fraction of the price of the real thing and carries less of the stigma associated with the mined variety.

De Beers itself has embraced Lightbox, its own lab offshoot, in an effort to maintain its market control.

The challenge for De Beers’ next owners is how to make the product distinct from the lab-grown variety.

One possibility is a marketing deal with a luxury goods group like Tiffany or Cartier, which could join forces to market diamonds around the idea of ​​”real” or “original.”

The costs of such a campaign would be expensive. But it’s not impossible, as the rising price of handmade Swiss watches shows. Many of these expensive items have diamond-enhanced movements and inlaid cases.

In contrast to diamonds’ struggles, copper’s appeal has never been greater amid rising global demand.