Sunday 30 November 2014

Diamond Miners & Exploration

The diamond market is notoriously opaque with very specialised skills and knowledge to provide valuations of non-standard stones and the DeBeers cartel controlling pricing until 2000.....more

However, as Martin Armstrong has discussed, in a world of airline metal detectors diamonds may offer the ultimate off-grid, portable store of high-wealth.

Just this week Rio Tinto announced a significant $350m investment in extending the life of their Diavik mine in Canada at a point in time when their major Iron Ore business is under price pressure and they have slashed capex to focus only on high potential projects. FT's Lex comment on Rio.
In 2011 Anglo American increased their ownership of DeBeers to 85% buying out the Oppenheimer family's 40% stake, making diamonds a substantial part of the group. Anglo Diamond overview

Recent Market Surveys
All highlight the very low probabilities of economic diamond discoveries and long lead time from discovery to production.
Large stones are low in volume but make up a large part of value mined. A recent FT article identified a number of junior producers who have sought to challenge the received mining wisdom with a greater focus on recovery of large stones.

The projected supply sees a plateau in mine production.




































Company lists from FT articles, Mining feeds and Junior Miner websites.
A significant number of companies return no prices from google-finance so the listings and project descriptions seem unlikely to be up to date.















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