each one designed to reflect customers’ specific manufacturing requirements or downstream market needs. These boxes of rough diamonds are presented to customers at the ten ‘Sight’ sales events that De Beers holds each year, with South African customers viewing their allocated diamonds at the Sky Park facility itself in dedicated viewing rooms on the premises. Traceability, security Provenance has become an increasing area of focus in the diamond industry, as retailers and end-consumers alike seek transparency about a diamond’s source and journey to market. Sky Park has built traceability into the heart of its operation. All rough diamonds of one carat and above are scanned on arrival, creating a unique digital record of each diamond’s shape and characteristics - very much like a unique fingerprint. At point of sale, each diamond is rescanned and the system cross-references the rescan against the intake record to confirm origin. The digital records are captured on the blockchain-backed diamond traceability platform, Tracr, developed by De Beers to enable a diamond’s provenance to be shared downstream. The Tracr platform continues to scale at pace with more than five million rough diamonds having now been registered. Finally, Skypark hosts a Diamond Academy that ensures all employees follow a structured development pathway as they progress through the various levels of the production pipeline. This academy provides a strong foundation for employees to grow within their areas of expertise, supported by a range of internal programmes designed to build futureready skills. The Academy also runs a 12 month learnership programme targeting young people from communities close to operations and combines seven months of classroom-based diamond sorting and industry education with five months of on-the-floor learning. Louw concludes De Beers’ groupwide strategy is to increase female representation across technical and leadership roles through recruitment, apprenticeships, bursaries, leadership and mentorship programmes plus inclusive infrastructure (gendersensitive PPE and upgraded facilities as well as flexible work). n
A guest admires sparkling diamonds on display at Sky Park.
Safety with sustainability “With our sharp focus on health and safety we have sought and succeeded in finding alternative cleaning methods to the hydrofluoric acid approach that has traditionally been used, enabling us to deliver another significant step forward,” she says. Developing the new approach required multiple trial iterations to achieve the cleaning standard required by the specific mineralogy of South African production. This cleaning innovation has drawn considerable interest, with teams from other De Beers operations also looking at this pioneering breakthrough. Another advance has been a concerted move towards renewable energy – enhancing the facility’s sustainability credentials and reducing energy costs. A 360-kilowatt solar system became fully operational last year, comprising more than 1,200 solar panels and 575 kilowatt-hours of battery storage. This contributes to the facility’s five-star Green Star building rating. Assessing value Once diamonds have been cleaned, their carat weight is measured through one of two processing streams, either through sieving or sizing or a combination of both using proprietary technology to support efficiency. De Beers combines a wealth of human expertise and leading proprietary sorting technologies to deliver an effective diamond valuation process. Sky Park’s Technical Sorting (‘Techsort’) area sees automated sorting complement experienced sorting experts to support a
fast, repeatable and objective assessment for the smaller diamonds, which tend to be higher in volume but lower in value. Meanwhile, hand sorting by human experts remains essential for nuanced decisions on shape, clarity and colour for the larger diamonds, which tend to be lower volume but higher value products. Sky Park was intentionally designed to enable this combination of hand and machine sorting areas, supporting an optimised workflow. Demonstrating the attention to detail, De Beers’ diamond valuation processes see diamonds end up being sorted into one of more than 10 000 categories, each with its own accompanying value in De Beers’ global pricebook. De Beers’ combination of human and automated expertise accordingly delivers reliable and consistent pricing of each diamond parcel that is presented for sale. Consistency An important defining feature of De Beers’ Sightholder sales model is consistency. This underpins the ‘Intention to Offer’ arrangement under which customers are offered specific categories of diamonds that reflect their business needs at regular sales events. To support scale and consistency with diamond supply, which is by its nature unpredictable in terms of the variety of diamond types that come out of a mine, De Beers uses a process called ‘aggregation’ - blending together “likeforlike” categories of diamonds - to smooth out variability in production from different mines. This, in turn, enables the business to create consistent ‘boxes’, with
JUNE 2026 | www.modernminingmagazine.co.za MODERN MINING 13
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker