The trade's next generation.
Isn't missing. It's unseen.

Notes from a session at the World Diamond Congress, Singapore, July 2026. A panel on generational succession, moderated by Rob Bates, brought together Cedric Barsamian of BFE Diamonds, David Troostwyk of the London Diamond Bourse, Kalpesh Jhaveri of Diamond Club West Coast, and Molefi Letsiki, who runs his own diamond business and heads South Africa's Diamond Gem and Jewellery Association.

Growing up near the trade in Johannesburg, Letsiki could watch rough stones move floor by floor through a building, cut on one level, polished on the next, without ever seeing where they actually ended up. Wearing diamonds simply was not visible in daily life around him. That gap, seeing the process but never the destination, was what eventually pulled him toward the retail and consumer side of the business, out of pure curiosity about where the stones went.

His account was the clearest answer on the panel to a question that gets asked often and answered lazily: does this industry actually lack young people, or does it lack visible ways in for anyone not born into it. Family businesses are still the main door, several panellists agreed. But a second door is opening. Technology has lowered the barrier for people with no family connection at all, and Hong Kong in particular is seeing a wave of young independent jewellers entering with no prior trade background whatsoever.

A few concrete efforts came up. GIA has run career fairs for students for roughly three decades, helping graduates figure out what actually suits them beyond the default ambition nearly everyone arrives with, working for a major house in Belgium. A Los Angeles diamond club has started offering internships directly to students with no family route into the trade.

The clearest infrastructure behind all of it turned out to be a group called Young Diamantaires. It began in 2016 at the World Diamond Congress in Dubai, initially as a World Federation of Diamond Bourses backed WhatsApp space where younger trade members could ask questions they would have felt too exposed to ask in person. It grew into organised trips, including a visit to De Beers' Venetia mine in South Africa, and now counts more than five hundred members across roughly twenty-five countries, spanning miners, manufacturers, and retailers in a single network. It has since become its own independent non-profit.

The sharpest idea on the panel about mentorship itself: the moment an older generation insists on showing a younger one exactly how something should be done, that relationship is already over. Nobody argued experience does not matter, particularly the trust built over decades that lets large deals close on a handshake. The panel's consensus was closer to this: the two generations need each other for different reasons, not that one should defer to the other.

The industry's succession problem does not look like a shortage of interested young people so much as a shortage of visible pathways for anyone not born into it. Young Diamantaires is one attempt at building that pathway at scale, and it has grown enough in nine years to be treated as established infrastructure rather than a side project.