Debswana Jwaneng Diamond mine, Botswana, South Africa
De Beers reported a 15 per cent drop in its global diamond production in Q2, as demand remained weak for yet another quarter.
The H1 figure (16.5m carats) is down 19 per cent on the same period in 2023.
The total number of carats recovered during Q2 2024 was 6.4m, down from 7.6m year-on-year. Botswana, which accounts for around two thirds all De Beers’ production, was worst hit, with output down 19 per cent.
De Beers blamed “intentional lower production from short-term changes in plant feed mix at Jwaneng to process existing surface stockpiles”.
Jwaneng, De Beers’ biggest deposit saw output drop 36 per cent during the quarter, from 2.5m carats to 1.9m.
Production in Namibia was down 8 per cent, Canada slipped 1 per cent and South Africa increased by 8 per cent.
In its Production Report for the Second Quarter of 2024, De Beers said guidance for the year remained unchanged at 26m-29m carats.
But parent company Anglo American has indicated that production for the year (originally given as 29m-32m carats) could well be further reduced to manage working capital and preserve cash in a weak market.
US pop icon Ariana Grande is the new brand ambassador for Swarovski , the Austria-based crystal and jewelry company.
Grande, aged 31, a Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, and actress, will star in the company’s upcoming holiday campaign.
Swarovski, which reported increased sales of $1.99bn in 2023, says it chose Grande as a “powerful advocate for inclusion and empowerment”. It describes her a “true style icon”.
Grande said: “It’s an honor to represent a house that shares my passion for creativity, pushes the boundaries beyond the world of jewelry, and promotes values of unapologetic self-expression.”
Giovanna Engelbert, Swarovski’s global creative director, said: “Ariana is a brilliant artist whose creativity shines through her songwriting and vocal performances as well as her personal style. I look forward to engaging in inspiring creative dialogues together.”
Grande started her career in the Broadway musical 13 when she was just 15. She had just finished on stage in Manchester, England, in May 2017, when an Islamic extremist suicide bomber killed 22 fans as they were leaving the arena.
In a significant move, the world’s largest diamond mining company by value has announced further production cuts, adding to its already implemented plan to curtail output by 10 percent. This decision led to a 15 percent year-on-year decline in second-quarter production, dropping to 6.4 million carats, as reported in an update on Thursday.
The potential sale or listing of De Beers was a crucial component of Anglo’s broader strategy to fend off a £39 billion takeover bid from industry giant BHP earlier this year. However, the ongoing slump in the diamond market poses a challenge to achieving this goal by the end of 2025.
“Trading conditions became more challenging in the second quarter as Chinese consumer demand remained subdued,” stated Duncan Wanblad, Anglo’s chief executive.
High inventories for diamond traders and manufacturers, coupled with expectations of a slow recovery, have prompted the company to consider further production cuts. This strategy aims to manage working capital and preserve cash amid the tough market conditions.
The prospect of deeper production cuts comes as the company disclosed the impact of other setbacks in its second-quarter production update, which had been anticipated by analysts.
Anglo has downgraded its full-year guidance for metallurgical coal from 15-17 million tonnes to 14-15.5 million tonnes following a fire at its Grosvenor mine in Australia, which has been out of action for months. Costs for the coal business are also expected to rise significantly this year, estimated at $130 to $140 per tonne, up from $115 per tonne.
The company is prioritising the sale of its metallurgical coal division due to strong buyer interest, with plans to divest De Beers, its platinum unit, and nickel operations to follow.
Additionally, an impairment on the Woodsmith fertiliser mine in North Yorkshire, UK, is expected in the upcoming half-year results, as spending on the project is drastically cut back as part of the turnaround plan.
Despite these challenges, shares in Anglo rose by 2 percent in early trading in London on Thursday, buoyed by production results for most commodities exceeding consensus analyst forecasts. The company achieved record second-quarter iron ore production in Brazil and is on track to meet its guidance for the copper unit.
Wanblad reaffirmed his commitment to streamlining the company to focus on just copper, iron ore, and fertiliser within 18 months. “We are working at pace to execute on the asset divestments, including steelmaking coal,” he said. “Work is progressing with the aim of substantively completing this transformation by the end of 2025.”
Having reset its cost base, delivering new life-of-mine (LoM) plans with a smooth capital profile, the focus of Petra Diamonds is very much on refinancing its $250-million loan notes.
“We plan to get that done before the end of this calendar year,” Petra Diamonds CEO Richard Duffy outlined to Mining Weekly in a Zoom interview. (attached Creamer Media video.)
The refinancing of the loan notes will place the London-listed, Africa-active diamond mining company in a position to execute on the growth potential of its long-life assets.
These are Petra’s historic Cullinan diamond mine, located 100 km north-west of Johannesburg, its Finsch diamond mine, which is 160 km north-west of Kimberley, and the Williamson mine, 140 km south-west of Mwanza, in Tanzania.
It will also allow the company to begin to execute on its value-led growth strategy presented by not only its existing asset base, but also through other opportunities.
“We’ll be able to deliver and leverage what we believe will be a much more supported market from next calendar year,” Duffy commented.
The main focus of Petra’s recent investor day was to demonstrate the resilience of the business through steps implemented over the recent months.
The key features were cutting the cost base by $30-million on a sustainable annualised basis.
Through mine replanning, Petra has also smoothed its capital profile going forward basis to around $100-million a year or less.
The main reason is to ensure that the business is cash generative from this financial year (FY) 2025 and to refinance its loan notes, which mature in March 2026.
Mining Weekly: What, specifically, were the LoM updates?
Duffy: In the case of Cullinan mine, we have a board-approved mine plan that goes through to 2033, and the potential through further extensions in the mine itself to be mining beyond 2050. At Finsch mine, we highlighted that the board-approved mine plan sees mining through to 2032 but with the potential to continue mining below the current Block 5 through to 2040. Williamson has an approved mine plan to 2030 with extension opportunities and growth opportunities well into the 2040s. We also provided guidance for the next five years so that we could create some visibility in terms of our production, which we see growing from the current levels of around 2.8-million carats annually to around 3.5-million carats a year by 2028. Most of that growth comes from increasing grade, both at Cullinan and at Finsch.
When you speak of a lower-for-longer diamond market, how does that impact Petra?
What we’re seeing is a diamond market that we expect will continue to remain a little softer through to the end of this calendar year. We took measures towards the end of last year in recognition of what we expected to be a weaker-for-longer market. The steps we took back in October 2023 around deferring some of our capital spend and initiating that cost savings programme meant that we were able to reduce net debt by $11-million from the end of December 2023 to the end of June 2024, the end of our FY 2024. The measures taken ensured that we stopped any cash burn in the business, even in a tougher market. The steps we’ve taken around costs and smooth capital profile mean that we’ll continue to be resilient as a business, and be cash generative from this financial year 2025 onwards. So, we’re well placed to benefit from an improving market, which we expect to see from next calendar year.
What makes you more confident about the market in the medium- to long-term?
What we’ve seen in the market is the culmination of a number of factors that have created some headwinds for us, and that really has been on the back of the higher interest and inflation rates that have been a little more stubborn than expected, the slower return of demand from China, which is an important market for diamonds, and the disruption caused by the rapid growth of lab-grown diamonds. Those were the factors that led to the softer market, which we expect to continue through to the end of December. Why we’re more encouraged in the medium to longer term about what we expect to be a supportive diamond market is around some of the underlying supply-demand fundamentals. If you look at projected supply, or global production of diamonds, all the way through to 2033, the projections are that we’ll see an average 1% decline on an annual basis over that period. When you look at the demand side, there’s projected growth to 2033, of 2% to 4%, so from a fundamental supply-demand perspective, there’s a structural supply deficit. The US buys around 50% of all diamonds, and the projections are that US demand will continue to grow through to 2033. Interestingly, China isn’t projected to grow at the same rate as the US, but India is emerging as a very strong consumer, with 30% growth forecast through to 2033. We see India and its growing middle class as a new, increasingly important market for diamonds that is likely to overtake China.
How are natural diamonds faring against laboratory-grown diamonds?
If you look at lab-grown diamonds, the disruption they caused initially was largely the result of consumers not properly understanding this new lab-grown diamond category. Over the last few years, we’ve seen the price of lab-growns collapse to now sell at a discount of 80% to 90% of a natural diamond. As a result, lab-growns are now firmly established as a different product category in the diamond space. They’re a cheap early entry point and that differentiation will become more discernible and clearer over time. Also, importantly, retailers, jewellers are shifting back to natural simply because the price of lab-grown has collapsed. The margins have collapsed, and it doesn’t make economic sense for them to continue to push lab-growns. We see, in a sense, some reversal of the displacement of lab-grown that we saw previously, in favour of natural diamonds. Another important point is a number of lab-grown producers have stated that they’re moving out of producing gem lab-grown diamonds, and they’re shifting their lab-grown production to industrial applications, around semiconductors, etc. This is led by De Beers’ Lightbox business, where they’ve indicated they’re no longer going to be producing gem lab-grown diamonds, and the same is true of a number of other large lab-grown producers. For all of those reasons, we see inventory levels starting to come down across that value chain going into next year, a shift away from lab-grown back to natural, and the general economics starting to shift in favour of diamonds with the structural supply deficit providing the support.
How do you see traceability unfolding?
We see traceability technology as being part of the differentiation between lab-grown and natural diamonds. What this technology allows us to do, and we’re busy piloting this at the moment, in collaboration with De Beers’ Tracr™ and Sarine Diamond Journey™ technology, is to map all of our half-a-carat gem-quality diamonds, and half-a-carat in the rough and larger. The data around a diamond gets block-chained in a register, and we then trace that diamond through the cutting and polishing. Our clients link the polished diamonds back to the original rough, and that enables traceability all the way through to the retail jeweller – essentially from mine-to-finger. For a consumer who then walks into a jewellery store in New York to buy a one-carat engagement ring, there would be a certificate associated with that, stating that the diamond was recovered from, for example, Cullinan mine in 2020. It would set up the number of employees that the Cullinan mine employs, provide details on all of the social and community projects undertaken by the mine, and include the carbon footprint associated with that polished diamond. So, there’s a whole story around the diamond that reinforces that purchase experience for the consumer, creating an opportunity to grow margin as part of that story, around the mine-to-finger journey.
DIAMOND VERACITY
The traceability that Petra expects to implement during the course of this calendar year will enable it to clearly verify that the diamonds:
are from a Petra mine; are natural and not lab-grown; and are not subject to any sanctions. The application of Tracr™ means that the diamonds from these mines will be subjected to the Internet of Things, AI and blockchain technology to provide comprehensive supply transparency.
In addition, the application of Sarine Diamond Journey™ begins with three-dimensional scanning to establish a verifiable image of the physical diamond and a definitive link to its digital report.
This enables the creation of an unbroken chain of authentication at every stage of the diamond’s journey – from rough to rough, rough to polished, polished to report.
Securely stored in the cloud, this data provides the foundation of end-to-end traceability.
A wealthy US doctor splashed out $275,000 on 5 ct emerald cut diamond for his fiancace.
He plans to have the D colour, flawless gem set in an engagement ring, according to California based Varsha Diamonds, which made the sale through retail partner Phillips Jewelry, in Tennessee.
“We’ll be setting it in the mounting of their choice,” said business owner Robbi Philips. “They are thrilled, and so are we. I feel honored to have found them a remarkable diamond that they will be proud of and will cherish forever.”
Varsha says its Fireworks brand diamonds are cut for beauty rather than size and the symmetrical step cuts achieve maximum white light brilliance.
“Fireworks Diamonds are scientifically proven by AGS’s Angular Spectrum Evaluation Tool (ASET) and Sarine light performance technologies to be the largest and brightest diamonds in the world, and all because of the way they are cut,” said Jay Mehta, director of business operations at Varsha.
Corruption in Zimbabwe has cost the country at least $20bn in “disappeared” rough diamonds, according to veteran economist and former member of parliament Eddie Cross.
He accuses the late Robert Mugabe, who served as prime minister from 1980 to 1987, of personally helping himself to $1.3bn of diamonds.
“We still suffer from massive leakages of economic output and income,” Cross, 84 (pictured), writes on his website, in a blog entry that pulls no punches and which has been widely reported in Zimbabwe’s media.
“When I was in parliament in 2012, I raised the wholesale theft of diamonds from the newly discovered Marange diamond fields,” he says.
“These covered nearly 100,000 hectares and in that year I estimated that we produced more carats than Botswana.”
Production from the Marange alluvial deposit started in 2006, after De Beers discovered diamond reserves, and continues today.
“It was taken over illegally by the Ministry of Mines and then exploited by six companies, all linked to powerful elements in the government, including the state president,” he writes.
“My personal estimate is that Marange has produced nearly $30bn in raw diamonds since then. A third was probably absorbed in costs but the rest has disappeared.
“Mr Mugabe famously asked where US$15bn had gone since mining had started. He knew the answer to that as I think he personally took $1.3bn.”
He alleges widespread corruption in every sector of government activity.
“It is well known that in certain ministries if you want a decision of any sort, you have to pay for it. I was approached by a senior civil servant for a bribe to sign a letter, I said but surely that is your job.
“I was told ‘do you think we do this sort of thing for nothing?’ I did not pay the bribe and did not get the letter.
He goes on to say: “This scrouge soon also infects the private sector. The statement by the Dubai Gold Exchange that in 2023 they bought nearly 450 tonnes of gold from informal origins in Africa. That is $32bn worth, a third from Zimbabwe. No wonder we are awash in US dollars in cash.”
Nita Ambani was a vision of opulence, literally studded in diamonds! Yes, you read that right. The grooms mother is renowned for her extravagant taste in jewels, showcasing an array of rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. But her love for these gems doesn’t stop at just necklaces; she seamlessly integrates them into her hair and clothing as well. On Sunday, the Ambani family hosted a grand reception to continue the celebrations of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant’s wedding, which kicked off with a spectacular ceremony on Friday, July 12. The Mumbai event was a glittering affair, with family members like Mukesh, Nita, Akash, and Isha Ambani in attendance, alongside a host of Bollywood and international celebrities.
Nita Ambani never fails to make a fashion statement, and her latest appearance at the reception was nothing short of spectacular. With her saree adorned in exquisite jewels and draped with unparalleled elegance, she once again proved her status as a fashion icon.
The value of rough diamonds mined globally during 2023 fell by just over 20 per cent, down from $16bn in 2022 to $12.7bn according to the latest Kimberley Process (KP) figures.
The volume of diamonds mined fell by 7.6 per cent to 111.5m carats, and average per carat prices slipped almost 14 per cent from $132.27 to $114.10.
Production in Russia fell by 11 per cent, from 42m carats in 2022 to 37.3m carats, although average price carat actually increased by 14 per cent from $84.77 to $96.64. Exports were down 5 per cent to $3.68bn.
Botswana’s production volume increased slightly to 25.1m carats in 2023 but plunged 30 per cent by value, from $4.7bn in 2022 to $3.3bn.
The global diamond industry peaked in 2017, according to historical KP data, when production hit 150m carats, a 16 per cent leap from 126m carats the previous year.
It held firm at 149m carats in 2018, then slipped to 138m carats in 2019; 107m carats in 2020 (down 22 per cent) and 119m carats in 2021.
Live jewelry auctions in New York are easily keeping pace with multi-million-dollar watch auctions, and they remain the best venue for large diamonds, gemstones and signed pieces. Sotheby’s Magnificent Jewels sale in June totaled $30,033,900, and Christie’s hit the $44.4 million mark, for a combined haul of over $70 million between the two.
A 14.51 carat sugarloaf cabochon Kashmir sapphire ring that sold for $1.8 million at Sotheby’s
Fancy colored and large flawless diamonds, along with rare specimens of emerald, sapphire and ruby continue to rank in the top 10 lots at most auctions. In the Sotheby’s top 10, the seven highest-selling pieces sold for over $1 million, and the top two lots sold for over $3 million.
The auction was led by a $3.6 million piece of jewelry, a Van Cleef & Arpels necklace. The tassel-tie style long necklace was fully set with several cuts of perfectly matched diamonds in tapered sizes. It was made in 1929, and would be difficult to make or find anywhere today. The second-highest lot was a 53-carat internally flawless diamond, another rare find, especially given than diamond mining is not the prolific activity it once was. It sold for $3,480,000.
For final proof that rarity is the driving value factor at jewelry auctions, the next lots were Kashmir sapphires, the prized velvety blue gems that haven’t been mined in a century—including a 10.31-carat Kashmir sapphire and diamond ring that sold for $1,980,000, and a 14.51-carat sugarloaf cabochon sapphire ring that sold for $1.8 million. Natural pearls, also very rare, are fetching top dollar at auction as well. Among the top 10 at the Sotheby’s sale was a natural pearl, cultured pearl and diamond necklace selling for $552,000, along with exquisite pieces from Graff and Harry Winston.
Christie’s sold the the Eden Rose, a 10.2-carat fancy intense pink diamond for $13.3 million.
This 2.28-carat vivid blue heart shaped diamond ring, surrounded by yellow and white diamonds
Phillips, which has for several years been the leading auction house when it comes to watches, also started holding live jewelry auctions this year. It got off to a good start in June with a New York sale that totaled $2.8 million. Leading the auction was a 9.81-carat emerald and diamond ring, which doubled its estimate at $165,000. A pair of diamond ear clips sold for $165,100, and a Cartier gold and diamond necklace designed as an undulating fringe sold for $146,050. The sale also included pieces from Van Cleef & Arpels, Cartier, and Bulgari and Oscar Heyman.
Leading the Phillips auction was a 9.81-carat emerald and diamond ring, which doubled its estimate.
Letšeng is the world’s highest dollar per carat diamond mine.
Gem Diamonds has announced the recovery of a 123.2 carat type 11 white diamond at its Letšeng mine in Lesotho.
This is the eighth greater than 100 diamond found at the operation in 2024, the company said.
Type IIa diamonds are the most valued and collectable precious gemstones, as they contain either very little or no nitrogen atoms in their crystal structure. Boart diamonds are stones of low quality that are used in powder form as an abrasive.
The prolific Letšeng mine is one of the world’s ten largest diamond operations by revenue. At 3,100 metres (10,000 feet) above sea level, it is also one of the world’s most elevated diamond mines.
The Letšeng mine is famous for the production of large, exceptional white quality diamonds, making it the highest dollar per carat kimberlite mine in the world, Gem said.
