- No urgency to sell the blue diamond – Masire
- The ODC MD had previously said Okavango Blue will sell by end of 2023
- “We are still strategising on how best to sell the blue stone,” — Masire
Business Updates | Diamond Trading
Las Vegas United | Okavango Diamond Company (ODC), the state-owned diamond marketer says there is no rush to sell Okavango Blue, the spectacular rare blue 20+ carats diamond recovered from Debswana’s Orapa Mine over five years ago.
ODC Managing Director, Mmetla Masire, said this during an interview with the The Projects Magazine last week in Las Vegas, United States, on the sidelines of JCK Trade Show—the world’s largest diamond downstream exposition and convention.
The ODC chief had previously told this publication that the 100 percent government-owned diamond trading company was looking to cash in from Okavango Blue by the end of the year 2023.
Okavango Blue is a 20.46-carat blue diamond of exceptional clarity. This rare stone originated from Orapa diamond mine in Botswana.
The original stone was found in May 2018, weighing 41.11 carats, and was cut in an oval shape to the current carat size. The diamond was displayed in New York in 2022 so that it can be remembered and recognized again by market players after COVID-19, according to Masire early this year
“The intention was to sell at the end of last year; however, if you look at some of the auctions of late 2022, they were a bit low, so we took a decision that the timing was not right,” Masire said in February when speaking to BusinessPost on the sidelines of Mining Indaba in Cape Town, South Africa. This past week in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, Masire told BusinessPost that there is no urgency to sell “Okavango Blue.”
“We are still strategizing around ‘Okavango Blue,’ looking at our principles. We are of the view that we need to be careful how we handle this diamond and see how we can optimize and maximize returns,” he said. The ODC MD explained that Okavango Blue has not yielded what was expected from sales openings undertaken so far.
“We believe that there is still an opportunity for us to put this rare stone into a position that will give us more. There is no urgency to sell ‘Okavango Blue’,” Masire said, adding that considering the current market conditions and low demand, 2023 might not be a good year to sell the blue gem.
“Though these kinds of rare stones don’t necessarily follow the market dynamics, this could not be a good year to try to sell Okavango Blue, so we are still strategizing so that we can make sure to get the best results out of the sale
