Moscow: Alrosa is mulling the possibility of establishing its own operation to produce synthetic diamonds, but the decision on this issue is not yet taken, the company’s spokesman Andrey Matveev said.

“We are studying but so far there is no decision. Meanwhile, Alrosa is monitoring the market to decide how to proceed with regard to synthetic diamonds,” he said.

According to him, the technique of producing synthetic stones has made great progress. “There are stones that are almost impossible to distinguish from natural diamonds. This brought about a risk of admixing synthetics to parcels containing natural diamonds,” he said.

Alrosa in team with Tisnum has developed a device to identify synthetics and intends to set up an operation in the Far East to produce devices for the detection of synthetic diamonds, Andrei Zharkov said in an earlier interview with RNS.

“We do not exclude that in the foreseeable future we will establish here (in the Far East – RNS) an operation producing our devices Alrosa Dimond Inspector for the detection of synthetic diamonds. Producers of rough diamonds and major diamond retailers are very concerned about the mixing problem, when synthetic diamonds are played off as natural diamonds. The biggest stakeholders in the diamond industry in collaboration with GIA laboratories and HRD are already engaged in solving this problem,” Zharkov said.