<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="131" >01 What is diamond</h1>
Faced with the fait accompli of this world, latecomers often have only two paths: either cover their eyes and deny its way of existence and try to find another way; or challenge it under its rules and overcome it!
From the facts, Chinese should be good at the latter.
This is the process of Henan becoming the "world's largest diamond mine".
All this began when New China was just founded. At that time, China, which was marching from an agricultural country to an industrialized country, was extremely short of a thing called "diamond".
Natural rough diamond
Diamond, a mineral composed of pure carbon, is an allotrope of graphite with the chemical formula C, which is also the rough of diamond. Diamonds, on the other hand, are one of the few purer, more transparent parts of diamond that can be polished to form decorative gemstones.
Diamonds do not press the table, let's talk about diamonds first.
Diamond, like diamonds, has a hardness of 10 on the Mohs scale and is the hardest natural material in the world.
This kind of thing has existed in China for a long time, as the saying goes, "no diamonds, don't take porcelain work", when the old Chinese products were not rich, the porcelain bowls that ordinary people ate were not willing to throw away if they were broken.
Sawed through the bowl
To repair these broken bowls, a special kind of craftsman is needed - curium (sound ju) bowl maker.
The curium bowlmakers are particularly skilled. First, the broken bowl fragments that are broken into several pieces are polished, and then tied up with rope, tied tightly, and then drilled the hole in the porcelain bowl with a "diamond drill", and finally the hole is tightly connected with metal nails. After this treatment, the restored porcelain bowl is impermeable and can be used as well as before.
It's amazing isn't it?
Curium bowl maker sculpture
Curium bowl maker is really a profession "since ancient times", and we have had these exquisite craftsmen in China since we had porcelain.
Now the elementary school textbook on the "unkempt child to learn to hang, sit on the side of the berry moss grass reflected." Passers-by beckoned by asking questions, afraid of fish and not being frightened", an easy-to-understand ancient poem written by a bowl maker named Hu Lingneng in the Tang Dynasty.
Until the 1980s, curium bowlmakers still existed.
And the kind of superhard material that can make holes in porcelain with delicate structure and hard texture without hurting other areas is diamond.
Because it is "hard enough", diamond also has its own use in the industrial age, mainly cutting, grinding, and processing precision parts.
Diamond Chinese have long been discovered, but there are not many diamond mines in China.
At the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, China lacked natural diamonds and could only import them from the Soviet Union and congo. But in 1960, due to the rupture of Sino-Soviet relations and the independence of the Congo, China had no source of diamonds for an instant.
China's oil exploitation, precision machinery, geological exploration, metallurgy and electronics industries are all in urgent need of diamond, and the small diamond has become a "roadblock" for China's industrialization.
Lack of natural diamond, Chinese decided to build it myself!
The State Science and Technology Commission entrusted this top-secret task to the First Machinery Industry Department, and the First Machine Department entrusted this glorious task to Hu Enliang, who had just returned from studying abroad, to be responsible.
Mr. Hu Enliang had just returned from studying in the Soviet Union at that time, and he was still a young man in his twenties. Faced with such an important task, he had neither data nor ready-made craftsmanship to learn from. He was only 10% sure that "foreigners have made synthetic diamonds."
Some people say that this is a certainty?
But for diligent and intelligent Chinese researchers, determining that one thing is "feasible" is the most difficult. As long as we are sure that foreigners can build it, then we can Chinese make it too!
Under the guidance of Wang Guangzu, a scientist of superhard materials in China, Hu Enliang's research group went through relevant technical literature day and night, and tried one path at a time.
In the process of hard work, there is a report in the foreign media that Soviet experts successfully synthesized synthetic diamond in 1961, and in 1962, Japan's Komatsu Manufacturing Co., Ltd. also synthesized synthetic diamond.
As for how to synthesize it, the report only said that high temperature and extrusion were used.
As soon as Hu En's conscience moved, he put the direction of the research on the path of high temperature and high pressure extrusion of pure graphite materials.
By the end of 1963, China's unique six-sided top extrusion machinery "61" type diamond synthesis device appeared. On the evening of December 31, the last day of '63, everyone in the research group had no intention of greeting New Year's Day, and they were anxiously watching the first synthetic diamond synthesis test in the laboratory.
The test results went so well!
Due to the rigorous and well-prepared advance arguments, the first, second and third tests were successfully synthesized into synthetic diamonds, and all the data were the same as those of natural diamonds. Chinese finally made his own synthetic diamond.
A few days later, Yu Hongchang, the leader of another research group, carried this batch of precious rough stones and scientific research materials and personally sent it to the Abrasive Grinding Institute (Three Mills) in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, to be responsible for mass manufacturing.
In 1966, the Henan Sanmu Institute, which had just been industrialized, produced 10,000 carats of diamond. By 1968, the production of diamond had reached an astonishing 60,000 carats, thus solving this big problem of the survival of China's industrial development.
China's unique six-sided extruder
Henan people have begun to occupy a place in the world's diamond map.
Of course, the three mills only solve the problem of whether Chinese diamonds are made. To form the general trend of China's diamond industry power in the world today, it is not enough to rely on a three-mill, but also to rely on the masses and mobilize the masses.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="140" >02 diamond cluster</h1>
In the 1980s, Feng Jinzhang, an engineer who had worked at the Sanmo Institute, resigned and went to the sea and returned to his hometown of Zhecheng County, Shangqiu City, Henan Province.
At that time, Zhaocheng County was still an unknown poverty-stricken county in the country, and the county seat was just a few depressed streets that could not even see a few small two-story buildings, and the cars on the street could be counted in one hand.
It was here that Feng Jinzhang opened his Shaoyuan Diamond Factory.
But unlike similar stories in general, due to poor management, this private diamond factory did not operate for a long time, and was forced to change into a company because it could not make ends meet.
Feng Jinzhang left in disgrace, and the employees of the diamond factory were assigned to the county drawing mold factory, and everyone was very frustrated.
However, what people did not expect at that time was that this closed diamond factory had become the "Whampoa Military Academy" of China's private diamond industry cluster.
Today's Zhaocheng County, Shangqiu City, Henan
A former diamond factory worker named Shao Dayong was a little reluctant and pulled a few people who mastered the diamond process to resign and start a business.
At the beginning, the company operated a diamond powder business. Due to the small size of the enterprise and the thin profit, the raw material price of the upstream enterprise will rise, and the downstream enterprise will cancel the order at any time, which makes Shao Dayong very distressed.
But the character of our Henan brothers is tenacity, they have to take root and survive in this small and micro industry, and tenaciously develop.
Individual enterprises in Zhecheng County initially produced only diamond powder, but later, they began to march to new products with advanced technology. A few years after the development, Shao Dayong hired graduate students from Xi'an Jiaotong University to help upgrade his factory industry.
On this basis, in 2002, Shao Dayong officially established Henan Xinyuan Superhard Materials Co., Ltd. to further develop the diamond business. By 2006, Xinyuan Superhard Materials Company had become a large company with an annual output value of more than 100 million yuan, and it was also the diamond "big brother" of the entire Zhecheng County.
The humble Zhaocheng County has also become the most important base for synthetic diamonds in Henan, which also laid the foundation for the county to become a nationally recognized "Diamond Capital" brand.
The legend of Zhaocheng County is not over, let's first look at another Henan diamond man.
Yellow River Cyclone founder Qiao Jinling
In the same era as Shao Dayong, there is also Qiao Jinling, a native of Changge, Henan, who is also a legend.
Qiao Jinling was born in 1946 in Changge County, Henan Province, to an ordinary farming family. Shortly after his birth, his father died of illness and his mother left early because she could not stand the poverty of her family. Then, the grandmother, who could not bear the continuous blows, also jumped into the river and committed suicide. Only the elderly grandfather and Qiao Jinling are left in the family.
At the age of 13, Qiao Jinling dropped out of school and returned home to farm. At the age of 17, Qiao Jinling, a young man from Henan who was not satisfied with relying on the sky to eat, ran to Shanxi to become a diligent bricklayer.
At the age of 26, Qiao Jinling used the 3,000 yuan he cobbled together to set up a brick and tile factory, and successfully made a profit of more than 30,000 yuan in the first year. In 1979, Qiao Jinling, who had tasted the sweetness, expanded the company into the second chemical factory in Changge County and began to produce woven bags. Soon after, the factory made a net profit of 100,000 yuan, the number of employees soared from 20 to 160, and the average monthly wage of workers reached 49 yuan, which was more than three times the per capita annual income of the county that year.
But the good times were short-lived, and after the success, Qiao Jinling was also targeted. Soon, because of the equity dispute, Qiao Jinling, like Jobs, was forced to leave the company he founded.
The Changge County Second Chemical Factory without Qiao Jinling, like Apple without Jobs, immediately fell into chaos and losses. Three years after Qiao Jinling left, the factory continued to lose money, with a total debt of 720,000 yuan, and workers complained.
The network picture is said to be the ancestral house of Qiao Jinling
Eventually, founder Qiao Jinling was invited back to the factory by the workers.
Back at the factory, Qiao Jinling sold the squeezed goods and repaid the debt. But at this time, Qiao Jinling, whose vision has been broadened, knows that only technology is the foundation of the enterprise, and the simple business route is impossible to go far.
In 1985, Qiao Jinling founded the Yellow River Abrasive Factory and went to Japan to purchase more advanced technology and enter the field of synthetic diamond. Due to his special business vision and the premium of new technologies, the Yellow River Abrasives Factory produced high-quality finished diamonds in the year of investment and production, and achieved a profit of 1.2 million yuan.
In 1991, the Yellow River Abrasives Factory achieved sales of 64 million yuan. By 1997, that number had reached 520 million.
At that time, the Yellow River Abrasive Factory, a county-level city in Henan, had become the third largest diamond manufacturing enterprise in the world after GE in the United States and De Beers in the United Kingdom.
In 1998, the Yellow River Abrasives Factory was upgraded to the Yellow River Group, and was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange under the name of "Yellow River Cyclone", becoming the first private enterprise in Henan to be listed.
In 2002, Qiao Jinling ranked 58th in the Forbes Chinese mainland list with a net worth of 120 million US dollars, and became the first "henan richest man" sent by the diamond industry to Henan.
But the tragedy is that the original tragic experience of the Qiao family still sowed a lingering psychological shadow for Qiao Jinling.
In 2003, due to the failure of a previous entrepreneurial partner to develop real estate in Hainan in the name of the Yellow River Group, the Yellow River Group was inexplicably saddled with a debt of 100 million yuan. Since the Yellow River Group could not prove that it had nothing to do with its entrepreneurial partners, the court ordered Yellow River Whirlwind to repay 100 million yuan in debt. Extremely aggrieved and unable to ask for help, Qiao Jinling finally couldn't open it and hanged himself in his villa at the age of 39.
At the memorial service of Qiao Jinling, the county magistrate of Changge County delivered a speech: Adhering to the creed of the Central Plains people of "starving to death and not being a thief, and bending to death without complaining" made Qiao Jinling be kind to people and bright and upright, but in the end, the people of Changge lost an excellent son.
After Qiao Jinling hanged himself, many reporters rushed to Changge County to cover the matter. To the surprise of the reporters, they did not find a single bit of negative information about Qiao Jinling, and looking at the schools, roads, and homes for the elderly donated to Changge County, the reporters could only sigh at fate.
Although Qiao Jinling died young, Henan's diamond industry is developing in great strides.
After 2000, Henan formed a huge synthetic diamond industry cluster including Zhengzhou, Xuchang, Shangqiu, Nanyang and other places. With the Yellow River whirlwind as the forerunner, the authentic state-owned enterprise Zhongnan Diamond and the private enterprise Yu Diamond have successively become listed companies. And Shangqiu City, Zhecheng County, also out of the power diamond, Huifeng diamond and a number of outstanding synthetic diamond enterprises.
As of 2017, the output of Chinese diamond is about 25 billion carats, accounting for more than 90% of the world, ranking first in the world for 15 consecutive years, and Henan province occupies more than 50% of the global share of synthetic diamond.
Henan, China, has also become the world's largest synthetic diamond industry cluster integrating scientific research, production and marketing.
Just when the Henan people thought that they were going to guard this industry and slowly roll inward, a new industrial upgrading opportunity appeared, and the "diamond mine" in Henan was forced to become a more valuable "diamond mine"!
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="146" >03 Man-made diamonds shine</h1>
In 2016, an International Synthetic Diamond Association called IGDA was founded in the United States. The organization's mission is to make cultivated diamonds more acceptable to the public. At the same time, de Beers, the world's largest diamond giant, also gave up the decades-old "diamond is eternal, a forever" and established the artificial diamond brand Lightbox, which began to embrace the cultivated diamond business.
What is a cultivated diamond?
We said, "Diamonds are a few gemstones."
Diamonds became the king of gemstones because of the love of European aristocrats, and the price of this hard, high refractive index, and particularly small gemstone naturally rose and gradually became the most expensive gemstone in the world.
Diamond giant De Beers also entered the world's largest diamond leader with its monopoly on the supply of natural diamonds and extraordinary marketing capabilities. De Beers, which monopolized 90% of the world's supply, was a diamond oligarchy that said nothing about the world diamond market, and now, although De Beers has lost its former hegemony, its impact on the diamond industry is also pivotal.
Many media have exposed De Beers' marketing process, and we will not repeat them here.
Diamonds are expensive, and naturally there are many imitations and substitutes. For example, zircon and moissanite, which were popular in those years, look more like diamonds, but they are ultimately something fundamentally different from diamonds.
Unlike a cultivated diamond, it is a diamond. It is an "artificial diamond" synthesized by artificially simulating the crystallization conditions and growth environment of natural diamonds.
When cultivated diamonds first appeared, people still resisted it, because after all, it was not naturally formed, and there were many flaws. But as the process evolved and subtle data converged, an artificial diamond that was almost identical to the top natural diamond appeared.
It has the same chemical composition, the same hardness, the same refractive index and dispersion of the top diamond, and even the top diamond experts with professional instruments can not distinguish the difference between the two, you say it is not a diamond?
In 2012, Silicon Valley gave birth to the American diamond company Diamond Foundry. It brings together a large number of industry elites from Princeton, Stanford and MIT to produce cultivated diamonds that are no different from the top natural diamonds through cutting-edge CVD (chemical vapor deposition) semiconductor technology.
The image is taken from a company ad
Diamond Foundry's investors include Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio, Facebook founder Andrew McCorkelon, Twitter founder Evan Williams, and Andris Behtosh, an early investor in Google.
In order to promote the cultivation of diamonds, movie star Leonardo has also repeatedly emphasized the cultivation of diamonds, which are flawless in terms of "ethics" and "environmental protection". Because one of the most resistant points that modern Westerners are most resistant to natural diamonds is that they may have been purchased through African warlords, who in turn collected them through child labor.
So as soon as the cultivated diamond was on the market, it caused a sensation.
Diamond Foundry first broke through one of the bottlenecks of man-made diamonds – quality.
In fact, Diamond Foundry's CVD-grown diamonds have been appraised by diamond exchanges around the world, and diamond experts everywhere have not been able to find any substantial difference between cultivated diamonds and natural diamonds.
There is also De Beers' hasty Lightbox company, and the cultivated diamonds they produce are also launched rapidly, not only indistinguishable from natural diamonds, but also can break through the carat limit and easily make a dozen carats of giant diamonds.
At present, the texture and purity of cultivated diamonds far exceed those of ordinary natural diamonds, and diamonds cultivated with the CVD method can already meet the standard of the world's top 1% of high-grade diamonds. With the iteration of technology, the quality of cultivated diamonds will infinitely approach the upper limit of top diamonds, and the cost will become lower and lower.
In 2018, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) even simply removed the definition of the word "natural" in the original text for diamonds, stipulating that both cultivated and natural diamonds are uniformly classified as diamonds.
This is the redefinition of the concept of "diamond".
But why 2018?
Because Chinese also breaks through another bottleneck in cultivating diamonds – yield.
The early synthetic diamond industry is to meet the industrial uses, Henan diamond manufacturers also know that if you can produce artificial diamonds, corporate profits will look much better, but this is after all the need for technology and process accumulation.
We know that quantitative accumulation will eventually lead to qualitative change, and this key node is in 2016.
It was in that year that the colorless small particle diamonds produced by the Yellow River Group of China using the HTHP (high temperature and high pressure method) method finally reached the 4C standard for identifying natural diamonds (4C represents carat, color), clarity and cut) and began small batch production.
China's hplavic method produces cultivated diamonds that are slightly less pure than the CVD methods of American companies, but have the advantage of fast growth and low cost.
In the marketing gimmick, or have to let the American company go a few years first, but compared to industrial production, Chinese said that everyone here is a brother.
Remember what we said about Shao Dayong, a famous diamond entrepreneur in Zhaocheng County, Henan? In the process of this wave of diamond to the process of industrial upgrading of cultivating diamonds, it was his son Shao Zengming who stepped out.
After the 80s, Shao Zengming, the "second generation of shi", trained in his father's enterprise for 5 years in the early days of his career, and then he came out to work alone and founded the Power Diamond Company. After the breakthrough of HTHP's method of cultivating diamonds, Shao Zengming simply transformed his new company strategy into the main production of cultivated diamonds.
In 2017, Shao Dayong, the founder of Xinyuan Company, fell ill and died. Shao Zengming and his mother Li Aizhen directly injected Xinyuan's diamond powder business into Power Diamond Company. At this point, Power Diamond has also become a diamond company with a finished body.
Power Diamond Prospectus
Although most of the business income of Power Diamond now comes from traditional diamonds, cultivating diamonds is Shao Zengming's real focus. From 2018 to 2020, cultivated diamonds accounted for 6.58% to 15.72% of power diamonds' revenue, the fastest increase!
And due to the global market size of man-made diamonds up to 10 billion, the diamond people in Henan have also found a new blue sea that can sail away.
A series of Henan diamond enterprises such as Power Diamond, Yellow River Whirlwind, and Zhongnan Diamond began to catch up.
According to brokerage research reports, in 2020, the global production of cultivated diamond blanks will be 6 million to 7 million carats, half of which will be produced in China using the HTHP method. Behind the increase in production, the grading of Cultivated Diamonds in China has reached the world's advanced level and occupies a dominant position in 1-carat to 2-carat jewelry diamonds.
On the CVD technology path of the American company, Zhongnan Diamond in Nanyang, Henan Province, has mastered the "20~50 carat cultivated diamond single crystal" CVD synthesis technology and reached the international mainstream level, and soon after, 20~30 carat cultivated diamonds can be mass-produced and stable.
According to Bain & Brown Consulting's 2019 Global Diamond Industry Report, the price ratio of cultivated diamonds and natural diamonds has changed from 80% to 35%, and the quality of cultivated diamonds has been further upgraded and the price has further declined, which will disrupt the entire diamond industry, and Chinese is undoubtedly the most beneficial.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="153" >04 holds the diamond mine, and it's time for retail to strike</h1>
Today's cultivated diamonds have less than 7% market penetration compared to natural diamonds. Experts expect that in 2025, the rough production of cultivated diamonds is expected to reach 18 million carats, corresponding to a market size of 38 billion yuan.
Upstream of cultivated diamonds, Chinese diamond companies are making efforts at the manufacturing end, and because we have the world's largest consumer market, some Chinese with a keen sense of smell have also begun to try to explore new markets downstream.
In 2020, the U.S. Diamond Foundry brand of VRAI entered Shanghai and currently has two stores.
By 2021, a Chinese start-up cultivated diamond brand company called XiaoBaiguang will open three chain stores in Shanghai in one go, and play the slogan to achieve the "carat freedom" of Chinese, which is unique in the industry for a time.
Liu Ren, one of the founders of Xiaobaiguang, said bluntly that girls have a dream of "pigeon eggs", and the price of natural diamonds is particularly high, young people get married with 20,000 or 30,000 to buy international big brand diamond rings, can only buy a plain gold ring plus broken diamonds, but with this price, you can buy more than one carat of cultivated diamonds.
Unlike Xiaobaiguang, another start-up cultivated diamond brand, Aishiyi, mainly takes the online route, and through the promotion of Xiaohongshu, the brand began to make profits in the third month of its establishment.
Guarding the world's second largest diamond consumer market and the world's largest "diamond pit", Chinese began to break the monopoly of European and American brands at the C-end.
Natural diamonds are in the hands of Europeans and Americans, and when it comes to cultivating diamonds, it is time to Chinese attack.
British company De Beers controls natural diamonds, American company Diamond Foundry promotes cultivated diamonds to the world, and now the diamond industry has ushered in the biggest disruptor, China.
In the past, diamonds were defined as luxury goods.
But diamonds are different from other luxury goods, which reflect brand value more, but diamonds are more dependent on the monopoly of supply channels.
But that's not fair! If your brand has a long history, I recognize it, but you rely on monopoly channels to tell stories to make special offerings!
And the cheap and high-quality cultivated diamonds can just break the monopoly of natural diamonds that are not reasonable channels.
Once consumers accept the idea that a cultivated diamond is a jewelry, it is difficult for the unit price of the diamond to go up.
If the massively cultivated diamonds produced in China can break the monopoly of foreign suppliers, how can natural diamonds that rely on storytelling to maintain the price system continue to be arrogant?
Moreover, the first to push this story down was the American company Diamond Foundry.
China is the biggest enabler of cultivating diamonds and a disruptor of the industry. Like other industrial industries, the industry with the entry of Chinese manufacturing is to redefine it with the standards of "technological subversion" and "people's needs" to break the inflated prices formed by the West in the industrial age.
Sooner or later, China will become the world's largest diamond consumer market, and Henan people will cultivate the largest diamonds for ordinary consumers around the world.
Some people don't understand what the Chinese manufacturing "sold to the price of cabbage" is really trying to do? The picture is to let those backward countries enjoy the convenience of modern industrial products, and the picture is to let ordinary young people also enjoy the "love" of real materials!
This is the contribution of Made in China to the "Human Community".
Henan people will eventually let the Chinese who love beauty realize "carat freedom".
[Thanks for reading, this article has references to other related reports.] It's not easy to write, if you see the past, please like or stay tuned. 】