Element Six

Element Six

Element Six was founded in 1946 as a synthetic diamond development unit, and it has grown into a manufacturing business wholly intertwined with the De Beers Group. The company operates through two distinct legal entities: a Technologies division fully owned by De Beers and an Abrasives division in which De Beers holds 60% alongside Umicore, the Belgian materials group that owns the remaining 40%. That shareholder structure means Element Six is ultimately a subsidiary of Anglo American plc, the London-listed miner, though its operational focus is pure industrial tooling and advanced materials rather than gemstone extraction. The firm deploys its synthetic diamond and tungsten carbide across seven named product lines: Energy, Machining, Road, Mining & Construction, Thermal Management, Wear, and Semiconductors. Its materials show up in oil-and-gas drill bits, high-precision cutting tools for aerospace and automotive supply chains, heat spreaders for electronics, and optical windows for high-power lasers. In the semiconductor segment, Element Six has positioned its single-crystal diamond wafers as substrates for GaN-on-diamond RF devices, competing directly with silicon-carbide alternatives in thermal-management applications. The firm operates primary manufacturing sites in the UK, Ireland, Germany, South Africa, and the US, deploying a proprietary high-pressure, high-temperature synthesis platform alongside chemical vapor deposition furnaces. Element Six employs over 1,500 people across those five manufacturing geographies, with additional commercial offices in Tokyo and Tysons, Virginia. Its self-described advantage is supply-chain security — it markets itself as a Western-source supplier of superhard materials at a moment when defense and semiconductor buyers are rewriting procurement maps. CEO Siobhán Duffy leads the firm's executive committee. A recent public move was the January 2025 publication of a global talent-community page, signaling active recruitment in synthetic diamond manufacturing and materials science across all its sites. What makes Element Six structurally unusual is its position as an exclusively B2B industrial-materials company inside a diamond-mining conglomerate. It has no consumer brand, no gemstone exposure, and no direct-to-consumer channel — yet it sits entirely within De Beers, a group whose public identity revolves around jewelry. That architecture means Element Six's synthetic diamond output is physically, commercially, and reputationally walled off from mined gem diamonds, giving it a sourcing story that appeals to buyers who need non-Russian controlled superabrasives but want a single supplier with deep Anglo American plc balance-sheet backing.