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Business News/ Companies / People/  Vishal Mehta | The conflict-free diamond maker
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Vishal Mehta | The conflict-free diamond maker

IIa Technologies' co-founder and CEO on cracking the technology to grow the purest and rarest form of diamonds and offering consumers an alternative

On the precision engineering side, Mehta says, IIa Technologies’ diamonds perform as well as, or better than, mined diamonds.Premium
On the precision engineering side, Mehta says, IIa Technologies’ diamonds perform as well as, or better than, mined diamonds.

Singapore: Will you buy a diamondn grown in the laboratory or gift a man-made stone? The answer to this question will eventually determine if start-ups such as Vishal Mehta’s Singapore-based IIa Technologies Pte. Ltd succeed in a world led by the likes of diamond producer De Beers.

In 2013, following eight years of research and development (R&D), IIa Technologies said it had cracked the technology to grow the purest and rarest form of diamonds—called Type IIA—in the laboratory using what it called the microwave plasma chemical vapour deposition (MPCVD) process.

Mehta, 33, co-founder and chief executive officer, says the diamonds produced at the company’s lab in Singapore are equivalent in crystal structure, chemical composition, clarity, carat, cut and colour to their natural counterparts.

IIa Technologies, which employees about 210 executives currently at its 200,000 sq, ft diamond growing lab, recorded sales to the tune of $70 million for the year ended March, Mehta said in an interview.

Mehta’s family has been in the jewellery business for four generations, and they first explored the idea of trying to produce gem-quality manufactured diamonds after a chance meeting in 2003 between his mother and Devi Shankar Misra, then a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Bombay.

“Between 2003 and 2005, Prof. Misra and my mother Sonia Mehta spent time to discuss and assess diamond-growing technologies, what could be done, what were some of the possible directions to research on, etc. During this time, a feasibility study was carried out that resulted in setting up our own unit as it was clearly the only way to work systematically, and with our own customized objectives and applications. A better part of 2005 was spent looking for the right location for this research pilot project," he said.

Mehta said Misra, who has an equity interest in IIa Technologies, had been associated with IIT-Bombay between 1991 and 2010 in various capacities, and at the time of leaving (in 2010), he was a professor in the physics department.

“Initially, Prof Misra worked in the capacity of a consultant and took leave from IIT and joined the company full time in 2010," he added.

They eventually decided to set up the research base in South-East Asia as the facility required easy access to semiconductor-grade equipment and infrastructure and, in 2005, met with Singapore’s Economic Development Board (EDB). “The aggressive nature of EDB to bring business to Singapore got us to be based here," Mehta said.

Prior to setting up IIa Technologies, Mehta, in 2005, joined his mother’s jewellery business—Al Nabeeha Jewellery LLC—which operated in West Asia—after finishing his finishing his masters degree in business administration from Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Growing up in Mumbai, Mehta went to the Cathedral and John Connon School, and during his undergraduate programme, trained at Star Gems for about a year. He then went to the US and qualified to be a gemologist with the Gemological Institute of America (GIA).

In September 2014, IIa Technologies announced what it termed a “major milestone" as it had been able to grow large size (7.5 mm x 7.5 mm) high-quality single crystal diamonds.

Mehta said the firm spent about $30 million on R&D from 2005 to 2013. “It was expensive, but a very carefully done process. The exciting thing for us was that incubating in Singapore was a positive experience—we were left alone—no interference. Our research facility was a 30,000 sq. ft facility in Woodlands—we had about 22 people in the R&D team," he said.

“Now our facility is very different from what we started off. Today most of the people that work for us work on precious metals handling, or on maintenance of equipment and the greenhouse, and on growing the diamonds," he said.

Growing diamonds is also more than replicating the natural conditions of subjecting carbon to more than 2,200 degrees of heat and 50,000 atmospheres of pressure that caused these rocks to form more than 3 billion years ago.

In the laboratory, it requires a “diamond seed"—another diamond, natural or grown—to begin with, and carbon is then layered on top of the seed. The process can take up to several months, and even in perfect and ideal laboratory conditions, the end product cannot be controlled.

“We aim to grow colourless diamonds as far as possible. But the end product that comes out of the greenhouse can be a range of colours—similar to how they come out from a natural mine, where they can be of different colours," Mehta said.

Similar to mined diamonds, only about 30% of the stones grown by IIa Technologies are used for jewellery and the rest are suitable only for industrial uses.

“There is no way you can control their growth—it is not a cloning process. You can have two diamonds sitting next to each other in the greenhouse and one could come out with a better colour, the other a slightly weaker colour—you are only able to control a range of output—you can have a range of output for electronic grade, a range of output for optical grade, for precision engineering and another range for gem and jewellery," Mehta said.

IIa Technologies says the company cannot put a number to the diamonds that can be grown annually as the time taken to manufacture them varies greatly.

Grown diamonds have also attracted controversy in the recent past as there have been attempts to pass off these stones as natural ones to the gems and jewellery sector, without following the mandatory disclosure norms.

The latest flashpoint was in 2012 when IGI laboratory in Antwerp, Belgium, received about 1,000 diamonds that were classified as natural, and polished diamonds even priced at par, but the testing revealed these were lab-grown stones of the highest quality, clarity, polish and symmetry, equivalent to that of mined stones.

In a report on the diamond industry in 2012, Bain and Co. and the Antwerp World Diamond Center, pointed out that the entire batch was synthetic. Several media reports had linked these stones to Florida-based Gemesis Diamond Co. that had claimed to be the “the world’s principal producer of gem-quality lab-created diamonds and jewellery".

Gemesis, which had been using the chemical vapour deposition (CVD) technology, vehemently denied involvement. After the incident, the firm was bought out by an entity controlled by Mehta and his mother, and its manufacturing facilities relocated to Malaysia.

On Gemesis, Mehta said the company had been a “diamond grower in the past" and that he had been interested in their CVD technology for producing diamonds.

“On the group level, we did acquire that technology and transfer it to our facility in Malaysia. As far as IIa Technologies and Singapore are concerned, it is completely home-grown and is not linked to Gemesis. But at the group level, IIa Technologies is one of the operating companies just as the one we have in Malaysia. The Malaysian entity grows diamond from a high-pressure, high-temperature process, which is a different and also grows a different quality of diamonds that are more suited for engineering purposes," he said.

At the group level, it has rebranded Gemesis as Pure Grown Diamonds Inc., which is now a distributor of Type llA gem-quality grown diamonds and grown diamond jewellery in colourless and fancy colours, in the US.

For Mehta, the future is exciting. For the first time, consumers will have a legitimate choice between two sets of chemically and structurally identical diamonds—one that is natural and the other that is lab-created, but “conflict free", or devoid of the “blood diamonds" stigma.

“We focus on the word sustainability more than anything else because we strongly believe in that. Today, there is a growing community of consumers who are looking at certain attributes in the diamonds that they buy. A very important aspect is sustainability—either ecological sustainability or social sustainability—that is something a grown diamond brings to the table by the very nature of its process. We have almost no air or water pollution, no hazardous waste and it brings that ability to the retailer to talk about it as a selling point to consumers for whom this is important," he said.

Mehta, who lives with his wife Nirali and two children in Singapore, also believes it is just a matter of time before entities in the natural and mined diamond space enter the grown stones segment.

But competition is also set to come from new start-ups such as Washington Diamonds that entered this segment in 2012 and says it can produce 150 one-carat stones per month.

Diamonds apart, Mehta’s passions include basketball, photography and music.

Edited excerpts from an interview:

What made you choose Singapore as your R&D centre as well as your manufacturing base for growing diamonds?

Singapore essentially gave us certain fundamentals which are very important for a new technologies to be developed. It has a very strong legal framework, its IP (intellectual property) patent-related protection and framework is extremely strong, the people here are disciplined, they understand disclosure requirements, they understand secrecy requirements… It has all the right balance for creating new technologies—there is no fear our technology will be copied or recreated by someone else using all the work that you have done. From a business point of view, Singapore offered us the flexibility to operate in the way that required to run this kind of operations, to do the research that was needed to create this technology and create the processes that were required, while at the same time, it had regulations clearly laid out. Professionals are easy to find here and the overall structure works very well in Singapore.

Has the industry and the end-consumer accepted the concept of “grown diamonds"?

On the acceptance part, the experience has been exciting so far. I will talk about two different parts—on the scientific side, the excitement has been overwhelming—we have seen that there has been an absolute dearth of diamonds for most applications—for electrical applications, for radiation-based applications, and to get them from mining sources has been almost impossible. There is no consistency in supply. Diamonds were largely passed over for many of these applications because it was not commercially possible to get them. In the last two years, what we have seen is that, on the precision engineering side, our diamonds actually perform as well as, or better than mined diamonds. On all other fronts—optical, electronic, radiation applications, these diamonds were required, but never there, and now with the availability of grown diamonds, there is a flurry of activities as far as R&D is concerned in these sectors. On the high technology part, there is a great reception and acceptance of these diamonds. On the gems and jewellery side, consumers will now see more and more of grown and mined diamonds. Each consumer will have make a choice based on own requirements—there will be consumers wanting only mined, or those who want only grown or those who will chose between the two based on several factors, including sustainability, price, and budget. What is exciting, the diamond market can now offer more to the consumer than before, and can also cater to consumers that want certain attributes in their diamonds—it increases the size of the pie.

There is a debate in the industry as companies in the mined diamond space want grown diamonds to be classified as “synthetic diamonds" so that customers are not misled. They argue that grown diamonds should be branded differently.

We have consistently maintained that the word synthetic is not correct, and it is not accurate from many angles. We carry out a crystal growth process. Synthesis literally means two or more elements coming together to form a third complex compound. If you look at a diamond, you are actually ending up with pure carbon, which is a native element on its own and, therefore, the word synthetic is completely inaccurate from a technical point of view. From a marketing or sales point of view, the word synthetic creates a misnomer in the minds of people that these are not real diamonds. That is not the message that we are trying to put out—our message is that these are real and are identical in every way to mined diamonds, and that they offer a fantastic alternative to people who look in that direction.

Is there a pricing differential between grown diamonds and natural diamonds? Is there a limit to the size of diamonds that can be grown?

On the technology side, there is no comparison on the price points at this time because mined diamonds were not available in quantity for these applications. On the gems and jewellery side, different people sell it at different rates—on an average, the price differential is between 20-25%. There is no difference in the product. Type IIA diamonds are some of the rarest and only about 2% of the world’s mined stones come under this category—what makes them unique is the purity at the atomic level creates a lustre or a fire that is difficult to match. The purity of diamonds at the atomic levels makes our diamonds very luxurious. All diamonds we grow are of Type IIA.

In terms of limitations to size, yes, we cannot grow diamonds to large sizes currently. The average size is one carat finished, cut and polished. Whether that continues to be there tomorrow in terms of individual diamond sizes is something to be seen and that is something that we are working on. We constantly focus on how we can increase the size and the yield. We recently announced we have been able to create large size (7.5 mm x 7.5 mm) high quality, single crystal diamond plates—the the limitation has been the width of the diamond as opposed to the height. The width has been the more important limitation because for electronic grade diamonds, when circuits are made using diamonds, the larger the circuit the more viable it will be—having that size of diamonds in electronic or optical grade available to order has been something that is very rare, and we have been able to achieve that.

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Published: 07 Nov 2014, 12:09 AM IST
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