The Trading & Beneficiation Division is key to the Company's strategy to capture a larger share of the diamond industry value chain. For more than 30 years, the business has been able to develop significant expertise, extensive relationships and a reliable client and supplier network, principally through the team's reputation for excellent diamantaire skills. These skills, together with the relationships of trust that the team has built up with clients and suppliers around the world over this period, have enabled the Trading & Beneficiation Division to grow and allow the Company to develop its integrated strategy in a very closed industry.
Today the division has operations in South Africa (Johannesburg), the DRC (Kinshasa) and Israel (Tel Aviv) with a new trading office in Botswana (Gaborone), and a distribution network across Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia.
The trading side of the business acquires rough diamonds from the Company's own mines, and also from contractors, independent third parties and the various tender processes utilised by the industry. The trading team will then deliberate with the cutting and polishing team to determine whether certain parcels of rough diamonds or individual diamonds should be sold as rough or be placed into the Company's manufacturing factories in either our in-house facility in Johannesburg or through contractors in Tel Aviv for cutting and polishing. The beneficiation team will make these decisions based on prevailing market prices for rough and polished diamonds within a particular category and class, the characteristics of particular diamonds, and the nature of the requirements of particular clients around the world.
This in-house expertise provides significant customer reach for the Company's own mined production, adding additional margin to the simple tender system, and also facilitates a transparent audit trail between rough and polished product to customers around the world. Customers welcome such transparency, as stakeholders across the industry seek to eradicate conflict diamonds from the pipeline at all levels.
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