Varda Shine Meets Media in Mumbai

At a Meet & Greet session in Mumbai held in Mumbai on April 11, 2011 Varda Shine CEO, DTC outlined the three big stories for De Beers this year as:

1)A strong Indian market – retail growth for 2010 at 31 %. China also growing well at 25% for same period.

2) The Supply Demand equation being weighted in favour of demand on the back of strong China-India demand, better than expected US performance, and with no new supply in sight.

3)New sightholder list being finalised – to be announced by end 2011, for period between April 2012-March 2015.

Shine also said that based on the good demand, De Beers had dubbed the coming 10 years as “The Diamond Decade”, and expected the strong growth to continue. She said this represented a great opportunity for diamantaires. Shine anticipated that diamond prices, both of rough and polished would remain on the upward graph.

She clarified, that even should the Zimbabwe-KP stand-off be resolved, and Zimbabwe diamonds start coming onto the market, it would not close the gap that De Beers anticipated between Supply and Demand. There would be greater carats coming to the market she said and these would feed the factories in Surat.

In response to a question she affirmed that the De Beers and DTC were very committed to the BPP principles and had in the past taken actions if sightholders were found contravening these, even if such actions were not made public, and would not be made public as there was little point in doing so. There would be third party audits in place with regards to the new sightholders too, and BPP would continue to be strongly followed and upheld.

As to how De Beers viewed the “diamonds as investment” question, she said that De Beers would continue to uphold the message of diamonds as an embodiment of love and continue to base its marketing on spreading the diamond Dream. However, it did recognize that in the past few years there has been a great interest in diamonds as another avenue of investment particularly in times when stock markets and other investment options had proved to be vulnerable as seen in the recent crisis period. To the extent that diamonds were regarded as a storehouse of value, De Beers recognized that it would be an underlying reason for people to purchase diamonds and diamond jewellery especially in markets like India. However, buying and selling it as a commodity was quite another matter, she indicated.

Mahiar Borhanjoo, Executive Director, DTC Sales was also present with Shine at the Meet & Greet session.