The Sightholder System

Imagine a supply chain where the seller doesn't simply auction goods to the highest bidder, but instead hand-picks a select group of approved buyers, called sightholders, who periodically receive a pre-assembled box of rough diamonds at a price De Beers itself sets, take it or leave it entirely rather than negotiate individual stones, exactly the distribution model De Beers built and controlled for the better part of a century, giving it extraordinary influence over which companies worldwide got reliable access to rough diamond supply at all.

Many of India's largest diamond manufacturing and trading houses, covered throughout this page as the companies behind Surat's dominant cutting and polishing industry, built their businesses partly around securing and maintaining sightholder status, since consistent access to De Beers' rough diamond allocations, historically the single largest and most reliable rough diamond source globally, provided exactly the predictable raw material supply a large-scale cutting operation needs to plan production confidently.

This system's influence has genuinely diminished over recent decades as De Beers' own share of global rough diamond production fell relative to competitors like Alrosa, covered elsewhere on this site, and other producing nations increasingly sold rough diamonds through more open market mechanisms rather than De Beers' controlled sight system, meaning Indian manufacturers today typically source rough diamonds across a considerably more diversified set of suppliers and channels than the sightholder-dominated era of previous decades.

Understanding this historical system matters for making sense of why India's diamond trade developed such deep, long-standing relationships with specific foreign rough diamond suppliers, covered under both the Alrosa sanctions disruption and Botswana's producing-nation relationship elsewhere on this site, decades of sightholder-style relationship-based rough diamond sourcing built genuine institutional trust and dependency patterns that continue shaping how Indian manufacturers source rough material even as the industry has genuinely diversified beyond any single controlling supplier.