

Why Titan’s lab-grown diamond bet looks carefully crafted
Titan Co. Ltd’s shares are up around 6% in the past two trading sessions, hitting an all-time high of ₹4,312.10 apiece on Wednesday, mostly led by the solid growth in its jewellery business, as per its December quarter (Q3FY26) update.It also held a conference call to lay out the initial roadmap for lab-grown diamond (LGD) studded jewellery under the brand name of ‘beYon’.
The call offered interesting insights into the management’s thought process.Its strategy is a well-crafted one, having realized that LGD may become commoditised, while LGD-studded jewellery may not. Therefore, it has no plans to enter into LGD manufacturing for backward integration and would rather source them from trusted suppliers.The management notes studded jewellery, wherein diamonds and precious stones are used along with gold, is under-penetrated in India with its share estimated at about 12-15% of overall jewellery market.Within that, the share of LGD-studded jewellery is only 2-4%.
This can increase if the price point is brought down using LGD instead of natural diamonds. The jewellery pricing of beYon is competitive at ₹23,000-25,000 per carat versus ₹30,000 per carat for many rivals.Titan plans to offer exchange schemes on beYon as well, but it is clear that the offer will be limited to the gold content in a jewellery item, not the LGD portion.beYon, which opened the first physical store in Mumbai last month, will be sold both online and offline.
Here, the management isn’t too aggressive and initially plans to open stores only in metro cities of Mumbai and Delhi.About 10 such stores are planned over the next few months. Eventually, the stores will be expanded to non-metro cities, too, depending on the response.True, there are concerns that
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