ALEX BRUMMER: Copper displaces diamonds at Anglo American

Diamonds have been the core of Anglo American since the modern company was created by Ernest Oppenheimer nearly a century ago.

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

Its products have inspired generations of young people embarking on married life, and the gems remain the sparkling star of movies and legends.

As glamorous as De Beers has been, with its arresting 1947 catchphrase ‘A diamond from a mine is forever,’ the company is now up for sale.

The allure of diamonds has been surpassed by the work-a-place copper – a metal less regarded than more decorative rivals such as platinum, silver and gold.

In demand: Copper prices have climbed 20% this year touching a record of $11,000-a-tonne this month

The drive towards a greener, carbon-free economy has changed all of that.

Copper prices have climbed 20 per cent this year touching a record of $11,000-a-tonne this month. 

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

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

Giants of the mining world are seeking to double down on the metal. The proposed disposal of De Beers by Anglo American, as it seeks to defend itself from a three times assault by Australian mining behemoth BNP, is all about copper.

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

The conductivity of copper makes it critical to the world as it moves towards more electric vehicles, solar and nuclear energy.

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

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

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

A window on the occluded culture recently was offered by the Netflix series Rough Diamonds. Anglo’s going-it-alone strategy requires it to sell De Beers in the hope of raising up to £5billion through a trade sale or by doing the splits 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 £1.3billion to £6billion as sales of its rough diamonds plummeted by 18 per cent. Sales have been hit by lower demand from The US and China. 

The real villain of the piece are laboratory stones. These lab diamonds are said to be virtually indistinguishable from their mined cousins and have grabbed around 20 per cent of the American market alone.

Danish jeweller Pandora is among the fashion brands to embrace the newcomer, which sell for a fraction of the price of the real thing and carry less of the stigma which comes with the mined variety.

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

The challenge for the next owners of De Beers is how to make its product distinguishable from the lab grown variety.

One possibility is a marketing arrangement with a luxury goods group such as Tiffany or Cartier where forces could be combined to market diamonds around the idea of ‘real’ or ‘original’. 

The cost of such a campaign would be expensive. But it is not impossible as the surging price of hand-made Swiss watches demonstrates. Many of these high priced items have diamond enhanced movements and encrusted cases.

In contrast to the struggles of diamonds the allure of copper, amid surging global demand, has never been greater.