Diamond & Jewelry News, Advice and Prices for Consumers
Diamond & Jewelry News, Advice and Prices for Consumers
August 30, 2010
I read that many experts in the diamond industry doubt the authenticity of the new sales stats published by the Alrosa diamond mining company. Could someone explain what exactly is this story about: Why would Alrosa want to fake such stats, are they in fact lies or mistakes and what would be the impacts of this story?
September 3, 2010
Lately diamond mining company Alrosa has published in its website impressive stats on diamond sales. As far as I know, the latest stats has not yet been approved by Alrosa's chairman Andreyev or company's spokesman Polyakov. Andreyev did in fact verified sales data earlier this year, including Alrosa's overall $150 million sales in July 2009. In September the company has received orders of $650 million worth of rough diamonds. Most of this amount, though, was purchased by the governmental agency Gokhran, leaving about $200 million obtained from commercial sales of rough diamonds. In October Alrosa was also quite successful according to data published. On the 22th of the month a new report was published, claiming that during that month commercial sales of rough diamonds reached $255 million while sales to Gokhran consisted of a total of almost $100 million. It seems that total sales are in a negative trend, while commercial sales of rough diamonds are on the rise, so I guess its both good and bad news for Alrosa.
In a more global report, Alrosa claimed to have sold about $1.7 billion worth of rough and polished diamonds in the first 9 months of 2009, among which almost one billion was sold between June and August. However, a contradicting report was given by Alrosa's spokesman Polyakov, who claimed that sales during the first 3/4 of 2009 reached a sum of $1.34 billion. Assumptions are that something in the former report, given by Andreyev, was not in accord with reality. Valery Rudakov, Alrosa's former chairman has given an inreview lately, claiming that Russian diamond industry should provide clear data and not insisnt on maintaining secrecy concerning the local diamond industry.
Perhaps Alrosa's attitude reflects principles which it inherited from the Soviet regime. The company must find a better system to reflect diamond sales and production data more clearly, otherwise the global diamond industry would find difficulties in treating it as a legite diamond production company. In days in which the diamond industry is becoming more centralistic, international diamond price indexes are published, in order to make the market free of surreptitious information, Alrosa has to join and to provide the diamond industry what it needs - Authentic data.
