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SourcingApr 20, 2018
De Beers Sales Slide in Third Cycle
The diamond miner and marketer’s rough diamond sales totaled $520 million, down 11 percent from the same period last year.
De Beers sold $520 million in rough diamonds in the third sales cycle of the year, while Alrosa’s January-February sales of rough and polished together totaled $1.05 billion.
New York—Rival miners De Beers and Alrosa recently released their latest rough diamond sales figures.
For De Beers, auction and global sightholder sales totaled $520 million in the third sales cycle of the year, down 11 percent from $586 million in the same period last year.
(The $520 million is a provisional figure that likely will be revised upward when De Beers announces its fourth cycle results next month.)
De Beers Group CEO Bruce Cleaver said the second quarter of the year is a seasonally slower period, but characterized rough diamond demand as continuing to be “good.”
The provisional sales figure for the second sales cycle, $555 million, was revised to $563 million. This means second cycle sales were up 2 percent year-over-year.
Here is a chart showing the year-over-year comparison for De Beers’ rough diamond sales so far in 2018.
Earlier this month, De Beers rival Alrosa reported sales figures for January and February, with Deputy CEO Yury Okoemov calling the core diamond markets “quite strong,” aided in part by jewelry sales in China in the run-up to the Chinese New Year.
He said prices for diamonds in most size categories were up the first two months of the year.
In January and February, Alrosa reported that its rough and polished sales totaled $1.05 billion, with rough diamond sales accounting for $1.03 billion of that and polished stones the remaining $14.6 million.
Also this month, the Moscow-based diamond miner announced the opening of a representative office in the Bharat Diamond Bourse in Mumbai.
Alrosa said the office won’t be used for trading but for promoting Alrosa diamonds in India—the world’s largest cutting center—finding new clients and solving technical issues for existing clients.
The company supplied nearly $700 million in rough diamonds to India in 2017, and in its new contract period (2018 to 2020), signed long-term agreements with
15 companies in India. Fourteen of those manufacture polished goods, while the remaining one handles industrial-quality diamonds.
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