Stellar Diamonds Postpones First Baoulé Diamond Sale to Late January

Jan 7, 2015 7:05 AM By Ronen Shnidman

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RAPAPORT... Stellar Diamonds, a junior diamond explorer and developer, announced that it had delayed its first sale of diamonds recovered from its Baoulé project in Guinea to later this month.

The mining company said that it has decided to send a second parcel of approximately 1,250 carats of Baoulé rough diamonds to be sold together with diamonds previously sent to Antwerp before the end of 2014. Stellar Diamonds explained that the decision to defer the first sale until January 2015 was made to maximize revenue from the project.

The second parcel of diamonds from Baoulé will be sold together with the first parcel of 941 carats and 3,700 carats of rough from the company’s other diamond projects that is currently being held as inventory in Antwerp.

“In order to maximize the revenue from our first sale we will conduct a second export from Baoulé in early January to complement the goods of the first export made in December. The planned sale will be scheduled for later in January, when buying activity resumes in Antwerp after the end of year break,” said Karl Smithson, Stellar Diamonds’ CEO.

Originally, the company had planned to sell its first export parcel of Baoulé diamonds by the end of 2014, as Smithson told Rapaport News in a November interview. In its statement, Stellar Diamonds said the first parcel from Baoulé was cleaned, sorted and valued in December in preparation for a sale but the sale date had been deferred due to a drop-off in buying activity.

Stellar Diamonds also reported that its trial mining at Baoulé had recovered an average diamond ore grade of 15 carats per hundred tonnes to date. Based on that ore grade and the current throughput rate at the site’s processing plant, the company said that it expects to achieve regular production of 2,000 carats per month at Baoulé in 2015.

Tags: Baoule, Guinea, Ronen Shnidman, rough, Stellar Diamonds, trial mining