Dominion Considering Online Platform For Canadian Polished

(IDEX Online News) – Dominion Diamond Corp. (DDC) is considering an online sales platform for polished stones from its Canadian mines.

The business-to-business website could aid the firm in marketing its gems while providing strong insights into the state of the polished diamond market, Chairman and CEO Robert Gannicott told Bloomberg News.

DDC last year bought BHP Billiton Ltd.’s 80-percent stake in the Ekati mine in Canada’s Northwest Territories which included BHP’s CanadaMark trademark marketing initiative, Gannicott said.

“We’re going to revitalize that and may well turn it into a polished-sales platform,” Gannicott said. Buyers of Dominion’s rough stones could resell some of the diamonds, after they are cut and polished, through the website with the CanadaMark certification, he said. “And of course that would then give us another price reference.”

The planning of the potential sales platform is still in the early stages, Gannicott said. In addition to Ekati, Dominion owns 40 percent of the Diavik mine also in the Northwest Territories, which is operated and controlled by Rio Tinto Group.

BHP created the CanadaMark tracking system to guarantee the purity and origin of diamonds from Ekati and help market the stones. “If you wish to have a Canadian diamond, this is a way that you know that you’ve got one,” Gannicott explained.

Gannicott said that demand for rough diamonds, which softened from around the middle of 2013, has begun to increase, with rough diamond prices rising by about 2 percent since November.

He commented that U.S. demand over the holiday period was good and there are signs of continued demand from China, the second-largest consumer.

“We are thinking that over the full year we might see a total of a 4 percent rise,” he said.