Russian diamond mining giant Alrosa has reported a 3.3% year-on-year increase in rough and polished diamond sales to $257.6 million, Mining Weekly reports. Rough diamond sales amounted to $255.7 million and polished diamond sales totaled $1.9 million.
For the January to August 2017 period, rough and polished diamond sales amounted to $3.05 billion. Alrosa VP Yury Okoyomov said: “August is traditionally low season for trading. This year was no exception, although sales volumes in August were slightly higher than a year earlier”.
Sergey Ivanov, President of Russian mining giant Alrosa, said earlier this month at a conference call that “there is a high probability that Alrosa’s output will be lower in 2018 than in 2017”, following the accident at the Mir mine on August 4. Ivanov further claimed that the decrease might be “slight”, and that he does not expect “a decline in sales in 2018 given that the company’s current diamond reserves are 14.4 million carats”. In 2017, Alrosa has not changed its target diamond output of 39.2 million carats.
