[refurb]

I always wondered what lab grown diamonds for jewelry would cost, so I googled "Ritani".

Wow, you can get a 3 carat, VVS1/VVS2, ideal cut, colorless for $3,000. That's a huge stone and very high quality.

That would be a $15,000+ diamond if natural.

[A_D_E_P_T]

This is really quite new. China and India, just over the past few years, have turned synthetic diamond production into a serious industry, and the fact that there are so many small producers is leading to a "race to the bottom" on pricing. A race we're now right in the middle of. Within just a few years, synthetic diamond might be nearly as cheap as synthetic ruby. (The raw materials are equally cheap, but making diamond is a more laborious and energy-intensive process, so it'll always be somewhat more expensive.)

[causi]

What's the profit margin on a 0.6 gram chunk of fancy carbon being sold for three grand?

[kuschku]

Not much, production cost is closer to that of RAM or a CPU than to a graphite pencil, as it's usually produced in the same way as semiconductors are.

[wtfmcgrill]

The margin is in cutting and faceting. The Swiss make a CNC diamond cutting machine that can cut and facet a diamond in about an hour vs days for manual cutting.

[npteljes]

Very large, judging from the second hand market values.