This morning, you flew into an area in the Arctic, seeing a huge pit from your helicopter. On the ground, enormous trucks pass by carrying tonnes of earth. Your first question to the engineer, guiding you around: how many kilos of diamonds in such a truck?

He explains that you are now mining a very rich area and that each tonne of earth contains about 2 carats of diamonds. Not bad, you think, imagining a nice 2 Ct-round brilliant.

What a surprise, when you walk into the processing area, where the diamonds are recovered from the earth. You see tiny baubles, sometimes a nice crystal-shape, sometimes a bigger stone, a lot of colours, mostly brown and faint yellow, and on the odd occasion that you have a transparent stone, you always see these ugly black spots inside.

Your engineer explains that the biggest part of your mine’s production is diamonds for industrial use. With more and more synthetic diamonds being produced for industrial purposes, the value of these is constantly going down.

Of the smaller part, which can be used for jewellery, most is quite small in size, and rather heavily included. In the end, they will end up in cheap jewellery under 100$, mostly sold through TV-shopping channels and in mall stores. Luckily, some thirty years ago, some Indian diamond cutters have specialised in cutting these stones, and they have created a new market for your rough diamonds.

Fortunately, a small portion of your production is of a very high quality and rather big size, and within months, this will be sold as high quality diamonds, exactly the ones you dreamed about last night.

That evening, you think about the problem of having all kind of diamonds, industrial ones, cheap and small gem-quality and some nice high-quality. You realise that your complete production needs to be sold at the highest possible price, for you to make a profit.

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