TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – The world’s largest producer and purveyor of diamonds, the De Beers Group of Companies, on Tuesday announced that it had added five newly qualified sightholders to its list of preferred bulk purchasers for the remainder of the 2012 to 2015 supplier of choice (SoC) contract period.

A sightholder is a company on De Beers’ Diamond Trading Company's (DTC's) list of authorised bulk purchasers of rough diamonds.

De Beers’ modified SoC replanning process, announced in 2011, enabled non-sightholder businesses that had demonstrated sufficient demand through De Beers’ auction sales in 2013, to qualify for sightholder status and term contract supply, subject to availability.

Sightholder status in the current contract period is subject to De Beers’ forecast rough diamond availability and eligible applicants’ submission of a contract proposal questionnaire as part of the 2014 intention to offer (ITO) replanning process.

Each applicant was subject to the same rigorous and objective selection process as those applicants that applied for supply at the start of the 2012 to 2015 contract period in 2011.

De Beers added that all applicants were required to adhere to the De Beers' ‘best practice principles’, ensuring that sightholders were “living up to diamonds” by adopting strict ethical standards in their business practices.

The ITO replanning process also provided opportunities for existing sightholders to qualify for new rough diamond allocations as part of their 2014 to 2015 ITOs. The new allocations were also subject to forecast availability and reflected sightholders’ demonstrated requirements for rough diamond categories outside of their 2013 to 2014 ITOs.

“Each of our new sightholders has demonstrated consistently strong requirements for De Beers' rough diamonds via their auction purchases and we look forward to working with each of them more closely. Our aim is to get the right diamonds into the right hands at the right time and our dynamic distribution system gives us the ideal vehicle to do this,” De Beers executive VP for global sightholder sales Paul Rowley said.

The 2014 to 2015 ITO period was the last in the current contract period. A new De Beers sightholder contract would start on March 31, 2015. Applications for the new contract would open in the third quarter of 2014. The new contract would involve a simplified allocation process and even more rigorous financial compliance criteria.

De Beers indicated that the dynamic ITO replanning approach would remain in the new contract, continuing to provide it with a highly efficient and responsive distribution system.

De Beers’ DTC’s trading operations moved at the end of last year from London, in the UK, to Gaborone, in Botswana.