The Diavik project has yielded better results than expected. It produced almost 5.9 million carats in the half of 2007, a higher recovery rate than last year. Also, the second quarter generated 3.3 million carats, as compared to 2.7 million carats during last year’s second quarter.

Improvements in the mine’s processing circuit are cited as the core reason for this increased production. The circuit increases the chances of recovering small and larger stones, which was not anticipated in earlier core sampling. The volume reportedly exceeds the resource block model by 10%.