ALROSA raises plan for diamond sales in 2017 to 40 mln carats

LUANDA, Angola, Nov 14 (PRIME) -- Russian uncut diamond mining giant ALROSA has improved its plan for diamond sales in 2017 to more than 40 million carats from about 39 million carats expected previously, ALROSA CEO Sergei Ivanov told reporters on Tuesday.

“The markets are quite stable. We forecast good sales in November, and in December as well. We think that we will be slightly above the plan in sales this year. We expect that we will sell slightly more than 40 million carats this year,” he said, adding that ALROSA had not revised its diamond production forecast for 2017.

The company also expects its production to edge down in 2018, but sales to remain flat.

“Our supervisory board has not approved the final business plan for the next year, it has not been drafted yet. We are looking at it, we have some fluctuations from time to time at our fields. Production next year will obviously be smaller than this year due to the accident (at the Mir mine). But we have some interesting projects, we are calculating them,” he said.

He added production will contract by several percent next year.

“Speaking of sales, our company has a rather good stock of raw materials, and we think that sales will not be that much less next year compared to the sales of this year. It is difficult to speak about stocks, but we think that we may sell by about 5–6% more next year than we will produce,” he said.

The company currently has more than 50 long-term clients, and plans to expand the list by 5–7% in 2018, he said.

ALROSA plans to receive a pilot amount of ore at the Luaxe field in Angola by 2019.

“We have to receive pilot ore to enrich the pilot batch. Then we will do a pilot sale, and a full-scale project after that. There is nothing bad here if the project starts in late 2018 or in early 2019. We are working at Luaxe, we are doing the stripping, we have reached the blue ground. We are working on water disposal, we are outlining the mine pit. It does not mean that the project is not working if we don’t have a final decision,” he said.

Commercial development of the field may be launched after 2020, and it is too early to speak about capital expenditures in the project, he added.

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