A method to make sawing beads by means of laser cladding is disclosed whereby metal matrix powder is molten by means of a laser beam on a rotating sleeve while diamonds are thrown in the molten metal pool. By carefully controlling the temperature of the molten metal pool at or above 1150° C. for less than 200 ms the internal graphitization of the diamonds can be limited. Although some of the diamonds in the sawing bead show internal graphitization it is demonstrated by the inventors that a sawing cord using the bead obtained by the method has an above standard sawing performance.