Gem Finds Massive Diamond, Stock Shoots Up
Post Date: 28 Jun 2013 Viewed: 369
The stock of Gem Diamonds got a big boost on Wednesday after the diamond company divulged that it had discovered a massive diamond at its mining operations in southern Africa, Mining Weekly reports. Gem employees harvested a Type IIa gem surpassing 100 carats in weight at the Letseng mine in Lesotho. After word of Gem's impressive find spread, its shares on the London Stock Exchange shot up by 7.74%.
The new stone was the third rock weighing in excess of 100 carats that Gem has discovered in the last two months. It joins a 164-carat D-color Type IIa stone, which has already been sold for a whopping $9 million, and a 103-carat yellow diamond. Diamonds mined at Letseng garnered the firm $22 million in revenues at a tender in June that saw an average per-carat price of $2,087, a 30% increase over the average per-carat price of previous diamond sales in 2013.
With these impressive finds, Gem could easily justify the installation of four new secondary and tertiary crushers at the mine. The new machinery is now operational, Mining Weekly reports.