Shares in Africa-focused Firestone Diamonds (LON:FDI) went ballistic on Wednesday after it announced that stable power had returned to its Liqhobong mine in Lesotho, with the plant processing at full capacity. Firestone had warned in October that the mine was struggling due to insufficient power supply due to a two-month maintenance shutdown at its only power supplier — Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP). As a result, processing operations were halted from the beginning of the month to Oct. 26, when diesel generators were commissioned. The plant then operated at
Anglo American’s De Beers, the world’s No.1 diamond miner by value, said on Wednesday that its last roughs sale of the year fetched $425 million, a slight improvement from the $400 million it obtained in the previous tender, but still over the year a whopping $1.4 billion less than in 2018. The figure is also 20% lower than the $544 million worth of diamonds the miner sold in December last year, and it has brought the company’s total sales for 2019 to only $4 billion. The diamond giant sells its stones ten times a year in Botswana’s cap
South Africa’s Petra Diamonds (LON:PDL) said Tuesday it had appointed mining engineer Peter Hill as nonexecutive director and chairperson to succeed founder and chairman, Adonis Pouroulis, at the end of March 2020. The company, which dropped the role of chief operating officer last month because of a management restructuring, said Hill will join on Jan. 1 as chairperson designate. Pouroulis, who founded Petra in 1997 and has been its chairman ever since, will in turn step down on March 31. The upcoming executive began his career in the gold division of Anglo
Alrosa and independent technology company Everledger are launching a new e-commerce solution on WeChat — one of the world’s largest social platforms — to help Chinese retailers track the origin of diamonds using blockchain technology. WeChat is created and operated by Chinese tech giant Tencent, which recently became an investor of Everledger. The new software will showcase diamonds from Alrosa, enabling full traceability from mine to consumer. It will also be offered as a white label API for jewelry manufacturers and retailers in China who wish to provide consu
Russia is proposing to move toward ending the ban on selling so-called blood diamonds from the Central African Republic, a former French colony that’s struck recent military and commercial ties with Moscow, amid resistance from the U.S. and Europe. The CAR, which is mired in civil conflict, should be granted a “road map” outlining the steps it needs to take to get the suspension of diamond sales lifted, Russian Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Moiseev said in an interview in Moscow. “We need to ensure that illicitly traded diamonds move to the legal marketpl
The glut that’s depressing the diamond market will last another year, according to industry consultant Bain & Co. The inventory backlog will probably be cleared in the beginning of 2020, but it will take some time for the market to fully recover, Bain said in a report released on Wednesday. Bank financing to the industry’s midstream — the traders that buy rough gems for cutting and polishing — will continue to drop next year, the consultant said. “The industry’s first and strongest opportunity to rebalance and regain growth will be 2021,” said
The world’s top diamond producer by output, Alrosa (MCX:ALRS) said on Wednesday it planned to start trial mining at a new section of its Luaxe deposit in Angola by mid-2020. The Russian miner and its partner Catoca Mining — the country’s state-owned diamond company — found Luaxe’s Luele pipe in 2013. They have since been analyzing the deposit’s potential, which they believe may turn out to be the largest diamond discovery in the last 60 years. Luaxe is located 25 km from the giant Catoca operation — Angola’s largest diamond mine —
Petra Diamonds Ltd has restarted its mining operations in South Africa, but is restricting power usage in line with requirements by state utility Eskom, the company said on Tuesday. Mines across South Africa have shut down after flash flooding triggered the most severe power blackouts in more than a decade, threatening a key export sector in a further blow to the country’s already slowing economy. Petra, which said on Monday it was halting operations at its Cullinan, Finsch and Koffiefontein mines, said it had resumed operations after Eskom scaled back its programme of rolling power cuts.
Struggling Petra Diamonds (LON:PDL) has had to suspend operations at all of its mines in South Africa after Eskom, the country’s electricity utility, declared a power system emergency and asked the miner to reduce its electricity load. For six consecutive days, Eskom has been forced to implement rotational load shedding — a South African term for planned power cuts — as a mean of averting a nationwide blackout. Today, however, is the first time it moves to Stage 6 load shedding, scheduled from 6pm local time onwards. Interruption of electricity supply had,
Just before the end of the year, the world’s top diamond producer by output, Alrosa (MCX: ALRS), unearthed a large 191-carat rough diamond at its Botuobinskaya kimberlite pipe in Yakutia, eastern Russia. Even though Alrosa experts are still conducting mineralogical analyses on the stone, preliminary results suggest that the diamond is about 2 billion years old. “This is a true sign to find such a large and high-quality diamond just around the end of the year,” Evgeny Agureev, the company’s deputy CEO, said in a media statement. “Nature has already endowed us in 2019. For example, a heart-shaped diamond was mined at the Udachnaya pipe just before Valentine’s Day.” Discovered in 1994, the Botoubinskaya pipe, together with the Nyurbinskaya pipe, is operated by Alrosa’s Nyurba Mining and Processing Division. The unit, however, was established back in 2000 and mining at the deposit began in 2015.