Diamond News Archives
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(IDEX Online) - A number of extremely rare purple diamonds have been unearthed at the Ellendale field in Western Australia.
Junior miner India Bore Diamond Holdings found fancy yellow diamonds at a large alluvial deposit, but tests by the Delta Diamond Laboratory, in Perth, revealed that many featured a highly rare and attractive purple fluorescence under ultraviolet light (see picture).
Ellendale fancy yellow diamonds command a premium in the market and are regarded as among the highest quality ni the world.
Fluorescence occurs in about 30 per cent of natural diamonds and more than 95 per cent of these fluoresce blue, with yellow and green representing just a few percent.
"Violet or purple fluorescence is normally associated with blue diamonds, so the fluorescence of these IBDH diamonds is quite unusual", said John Chapman, who is investigating the relationship between the diamonds' spectrographic characteristics and the genesis of the Ellendale signature pure yellow colour.
The so-called The L-Channel of Ellendale, where the purple stones were found, is estimated to contain at least 1.3 million carats of gem quality diamonds, including fancy yellows....
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(IDEX Online) - Chinese mining giant Anjin has officially resumed operations at Chiadzwa, Zimbabwe, almost five years after all the country's diamond mining was consolidated into a single government-run corporation.
The Mugabe administration forced the closure of seven mining companies, including Anjin, and went on to merge their assets into the Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company (ZCDC).
But President Emmerson Mnangagwa's government has since decided to reverse that move in the hope that it will to restore productivity in the diamonds sector and develop its ailing economy.
The Anjin Diamond Mining Company contributed about $200m to Zimbabwe's economy before it was forced to halt mining in 2016.
It has so far invested $38m to re-start operations at Chiadzwa, in Manicaland Province, and says it will soon employ about 500 people.
Zimbabwe hopes to exploit its rich diamond reserves and treble annual production to 12m carats by 2025, said Winston Chitando minister of mines and mining development, at a ceremony to mark the re-opening of the mine.
Pic shows President Emmerson Mnangagwa...
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(IDEX Online) - Alrosa's Q2 profit slumped by 98 per cent, to just $3.6m, as the COVID-19 pandemic saw demand for diamonds all but evaporate.
The release of its results came days after the Russian state-owned miner, and the world's biggest producer of diamonds by volume, reported a 79 per cent drop in sales (rough and polished for July were just $35.8m).
Despite the disappointing performance, the company believes the retail sector is showing signs of recovery and that will result in some return of demand for rough within a month.
For now, this growth has been met by existing diamonds' stocks at the mid-stream cutters, but we believe that the cutters' purchasing activity will start to recover in September ahead of the seasonal growth in demand for polished diamonds in November-January," said Alrosa's CFO Alexey Philippovskiy.
But he cautioned that a second wave of coronavirus, which could "tame the nascent recovery".
The company is widely reported to be seeking another rescue deal to sell up to $1bn of its rough to Gokhran, the finance ministry's precious metals and gems repository, as it did to survive the the 2008-9 global financial crisis.
Alrosa has, like its biggest rival De Beers, been pursuing a price-over-volume strategy and has been offering what it calls unprecedented flexibility to its long-term clients during "extremely challenging market conditions".
Pic shows a large, rough diamond, courtesy Alrosa...
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