01 Mar 2022

Mining giant, De Beers, is set to bring  its diamond sales activities referred to as ‘sights’ back to Botswana.

The sights, De Beer’s marketing exercise to exhibit its new batch of diamonds, was moved from Botswana two years ago, owing to the advent of COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions on movement of people and products in various jurisdictions.

Customers from across the world fly ten times a year to participate in week-long diamond sales, which account for 90 per cent of the company's total annual sales.

"From March, we are bringing back the sights to Gaborone and we look forward to meeting again as an industry, after a long time," said De Beers’ Executive Vice-President, Diamond Trading, Mr Paul Rowley, through an online media briefing recently.

Mr Rowley said De Beers would maintain some flexibility for some customers who will still not be able to come to Botswana, with the sight event extended beyond its normal week-long duration.

The return of diamond sights, Mr Rowley said was  expected to bring in valuable foreign exchange to Botswana, which had lost out additional earnings from travel, hospitality and ancillary services, even though sales income still came to the country.

He said holding sights at the usual location enables the faster delivery of goods to the market, adding that this is especially significant now that sales volumes were returning to normal levels, as sending rough to and from other countries can lead to delays.

He said as anticipated, there was strong growth in consumer demand for diamond jewellery over the end of year holiday season, thus the continuation of robust rough diamond demand in the first sales cycle of the year, as buyers focus on restocking depleted inventories.

Apart from the large business delegations who visit the country ten times a year, Mr Rowley said the pre-sale viewings are known to attract more than 100 high net worth diamond magnates, who spend heavily in the country.

The majority of diamond mining in the country is done by Debswana, a joint venture held by government and De Beers, which sells 75 percent of the diamonds mined to De Beers, while the remaining 25 percent is sold to state-owned Okavango Diamond Company.

According to the business journal Bloomberg, De Beers hiked prices by about eight per cent at its first sale of the year, and the sharpest increases, of up to 20 per cent,  were for smaller, cheaper stones.

The company increased the price of its rough diamonds throughout much of 2021 as it sought to recover from the first year of the pandemic, when the industry came to a near halt. Most of these hikes, however, were applied to stones bigger than one carat.

De Beers moved its sights from London to Gaborone in 2013 as part of a 10-year deal with the government. BOPA