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Anglo American has written down the value of its De Beers diamond business for the second time in two years, as it races to complete a drastic restructuring by the end of the year.
The London-listed miner said on Thursday it had booked an impairment charge of $2.9bn on the diamonds unit, which has been hit by a slump in the market for the precious stones. That follows the $1.6bn writedown of De Beers that Anglo reported in its annual results last year.
Diamond prices have fallen over the past decade, and the market has come under recent pressure from the rise in popularity of cheaper lab-grown diamonds and the pullback in consumer spending in China.
Impairment charges helped to push Anglo to a $3.1bn net loss in 2024, down from a $283mn profit the previous year. Shares in the company, which have jumped more than 40 per cent over the past 12 months, rose 5 per cent by lunchtime in London.
The charge comes as Anglo races to execute an ambitious turnaround plan following last year’s £39bn takeover attempt by rival BHP.
Anglo fended off the bid, promising instead to overhaul itself by offloading businesses by the end of 2025 in order to focus on copper and iron ore.
The FTSE 100 group has made progress on three of the four main elements of its restructuring plan, selling its steelmaking coal assets and this week announcing the planned sale of its nickel business and preparations for the spin-off of its platinum arm.
But divesting De Beers has been more challenging. Anglo’s chief executive Duncan Wanblad said on Thursday that conditions in the diamonds market meant that “I’m really not expecting much traction or progress on [offloading De Beers] in the first half of this year”, though that could “pick up” in the second half.
Anglo is considering both selling and listing De Beers, the carrying value of which is now about $4bn. That includes about $2bn worth of stock, a similar amount to last year.
Wanblad said Anglo had received “a number of unsolicited inbounds” for De Beers. However, he said the company had not yet launched the formal sale process because it had only this month finalised key licensing agreements with the government of Botswana, which owns 15 per cent of De Beers.
The Botswanan president had “absolutely confirmed his intention to me directly to take an increased stake” in De Beers, though “didn’t say how much he wanted to take”, Wanblad said.
Overall, Anglo’s turnaround would be “substantively complete this year”, he added.
He also insisted the group would remain listed in London, despite rumblings at rival miners Rio Tinto and Glencore over moving away from the UK capital.
“London’s been fine . . . It works for us . . . we can’t see a better jurisdiction for us right now. And we certainly can’t see that a different jurisdiction would make a material difference to the type of portfolio that we’ve got going forward,” he said.
Separately, Anglo announced on Thursday that it had agreed a deal with Chilean state-owned mining company Codelco to launch a joint plan for the companies’ existing, adjacent copper mines in Chile. It would “increase copper production with minimal additional capital required”, said Anglo.
Nevertheless, Anglo forecast lower copper production this year than in 2024, with diamond production also expected to be lower.
Asked whether there were more such deals in the pipeline, Wanblad said: “There are more that we’re looking at . . . there are some of these natural synergies that exist that can be exploited.”
John Meyer, a mining analyst at broker SP Angel, said this week that Anglo’s slimming down of the business and growing cash pile from the sales of assets such as its nickel assets “carries the risk of attracting interest from other potential predators”.
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