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Mining
Mining
Diamond miner Lucapa today showed off a 43-carat yellow gem dug up in its Angola “Lulo” mine.
The stone is “the largest coloured gem-quality diamond recovered to date from Lulo, surpassing the 39 carat pink recovered in September 2016”, Lucapa told investors.
Natural coloured diamonds are very rare — about one out of every 10,000 carats. However yellows are the most common, making up about 60 per cent of all coloured diamonds.
A 116 carat low-quality diamond was also recovered.
“It is the 10th 100-plus carat diamond recovered to date from Lulo and the second 100-plus carat recovered within the first three weeks of 2018,” reported Lucapa (ASX:LOM).
The finds weren’t enough to support Lucapa’s share price however. The stock fell 2 per cent to 25c on Wednesday, valuing the company at about $100 million.
Polished diamond prices continued a downward trend in 2016-17, “reflecting soft consumer demand for diamond jewellery across key markets”, according to Bain & Company’s annual diamond report released last month.
Global sales of diamond jewellery were “roughly stable”, held back by flat sales in the US — the world’s biggest market.
The outlook was “stable across the different segments of the value chain”, but the industry faced “three key, persistent challenges” according to Bain: