- Job cuts expects as diamond miner looks to slash £78m of costs
Dazzling: Taylor Swift was draped in De Beers jewels at the Golden Globes
De Beers is set to unveil a wide-ranging business strategy within weeks after warning it had been hammered by a slump in diamond prices.
Boss Al Cook is expected to lay out in more detail how many jobs will be cut from its 20,000-strong workforce, how it will slash costs by £78 million a year and which projects it will sell or shut.
De Beers is the world’s largest diamond miner by value and is famous for creating the advertising slogan ‘A diamond is forever’ in the 1960s.
Cook told The Mail on Sunday he wanted to ‘rekindle’ the allure of natural diamonds at a time when cheaper lab-grown alternatives have risen in popularity.
As well as grappling with a slump in the value of the stones, De Beers’ owner Anglo American recently wrote down the value of the company by £1.3 billion.
Cook said he did not expect the business to start recovering until the second half of this year.