Image credit: Endiama (Facebook)
“We were stuck for a long time and were not able to sell our rough diamonds,” company president Ganga Júnior told an Angola - Dubai: Important Partners in the Future of Trade webinar recently through an interpreter.
Several diamond companies, including De Beers, temporarily suspended diamond sales around March this year when governments closed their borders and introduced strict lockdowns to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
The bulk of the companies have since resumed diamond sales, although they had to adjust their traditional ways of conducting auctions.
Ganga Júnior also told the webinar that Endiama had revised its production target downwards as a result of disruptions by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Endiama had previously said that it was expecting to produce 8.3 million carats by December, a 20% decline from the initial target of 10.5 million carats this year.
The company was also expecting to collect $1.1 billion in revenue this year from the initial target of $1.4 billion.
Angola earned about 1.3 billion from just over 9.44 million carats of diamonds sold in 2019.
Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished
