The company said its sales of rough and polished diamonds amounted to $ 152.8 million in March 2020, down 59.5% vs March 2019 ($ 377.1 million). ALROSA earned $ 148.7 million from rough sales (against $ 369.2 million last year) and $ 4.1 million from polished sales (against $ 8.0 million last year).Totally, the diamond miner raked in $ 904.2 million from sales in the first quarter of 2020 against $ 1.004 million in 2019 (a decrease of 10%). ALROSA also announced that it had terminated long-term contracts with some of its customers.
“March demand for rough and polished diamonds in all key markets demonstrated a steep decline. The uncertainty in February was followed by severe restrictions and even the suspension of trading because of border closures and quarantine measures across the world. Needless to say that this has had an extremely adverse effect all along the diamond pipeline. In this turbulent environment, the situation at the start and at the end of our trading session in March was completely different. That is why we had to adjust and offer more flexible sales terms on the go.
We would like to thank those of our customers who stick to our long-term contracts, though with several companies we had to terminate such contracts and switch to spot sales,” says Evgeny Agureev, Deputy CEO of ALROSA. “However, according to the latest news, the epidemiological situation in China, one of the major diamond markets, is gradually improving and moving towards less strict quarantine measures. This gives us the hope that this market will be the first to start recovering the demand in the nearest future.”
Victoria Quiri, Correspondent of the European Bureau, Rough & Polished, Strasbourg
