Moscow: ALROSA president Andrey Zharkov said that the Russian diamond giant will create an analytical center tasked with targeting diamond prices and monitoring market development environment, reports Rough-Polished.

The decision to set up such a center is a result of the situation in 2015, when a wrong forecast that market stakeholders made with regard to jewelry demand in China had dire consequences throughout the diamond pipeline. Diamond manufacturers and jewelry merchants expected double-digit growth in demand in China, “But unfortunately, the situation was the reverse,” said Zharkov. Excessive stocks accumulating in the midstream segment contributed to a drop in demand for rough diamonds, resulting in lower sales for diamond mining companies and a 15 percent fall in prices. “Our goal in 2015 was to bring stocks to normal levels and to stabilize prices,” he added.

Zharkov went on to say that, “Based on the events that we observed in the past year, we are busy creating a think tank whose task will not be just predicting prices and conditions for market development, but also targeting. Our company is one of the major industry players, a market maker, and it should not just predict certain events in the market, but also predetermine them,” he stressed. In the second half of 2016, ALROSA, “Does not expect very serious volatility, as consumption volume is turning stable.”.