The final tallies are in for the 2018 calendar year, revealing that the world’s top diamond producer, Alrosa, registered a 6% increase in sales of all diamonds, rough and polished, according to Diamond World. Between January and December 2018, Alrosa sold $95.3 million worth of polished diamonds and $4.412 billion worth of rough diamonds, or $4.507 billion in total sales.
In the month of December alone, Alrosa banked $323.7 million in rough diamond sales and $5 million in polished diamond sales. The total sales figure for December, $328.7 million, represented an impressive 20% increase over November 2018’s sales figures, and a whopping 38% increase over the firm’s sales figures from December 2017, year-over-year.
“Market demand was strong in all rough diamond categories, and traditional slowdown in demand in the second quarter due to seasonality was not registered this year,” commented Evgeny Agureev, Alrosa management board member and director of USO Alrosa. “The company was actively engaged in optimizing its stocks, which made it possible to increase sales in physical terms, despite a decline in production in 2018 by 8 per cent to 36.6 million carats.”
