Petra Diamonds announced on Friday that it is to acquire the Finsch diamond mine located in South Africa from its current owners, De Beers Consolidated Mines for a price of 1.425 billion rand. It has also raised $325 million through a private equity placing.
Finsch is the second largest diamond mine in South Africa in terms of production. Last year in July De Beers had announced that it was looking to sell the Finsch mine located in the Northern Cape. Since Petra Diamonds had already bought a number of other diamond mines from De Beers this was a logical transition.
Johan Dippenaar, Chief Executive Officer of Petra Diamonds said that the acquisition was a landmark development for Petra and a further progression of its strategy to build one of the world's leading independent diamond producers.
The acquisition of the new diamond mine will allow the Petra group production to double. The full year production of the mine is 1.5 Mctpa while the group’s current production rests at 1.3 Mctpa. By the financial year 2014 Petra hopes that the combined group production will reach 4 Mctpa. Its target for the year 2019 is 5 Mctpa.
The company has also acquired other mines which include Cullinan, Koffiefontein and Kimberley Underground operations in South Africa and the Williamson mine in Tanzania.