Alrosa boosts its sales performance

Alrosa has announced its project to boost its sales division’s performance has resulted in the company reducing the amount of diamonds in the work-in-progress inventory by 4.3 million carats by the end of 2021, freeing up rough diamonds valued at over $300m (£221.37m) for sale.

Alrosa said the project to accelerate its production processes and reduce its volume of work-in-progress inventories (the diamonds that have left the processing plant but are not yet ready for sale) has accelerated the pre-sale process in 2018-2021.

This has reportedly helped “permanently reduce” the duration of the pre-sale production cycle by 30-40%, or 15-25 days depending on the type of goods, and Alrosa has released $320m (£236.13m) from working capital in the three year period.

According to Alrosa, these results were achieved through a number of initiatives, including the automation of sorting and accelerating the journey of rough diamonds to trading sessions.

In addition, the launch of a system focused on continuous improvement reportedly encouraged staff to “constantly evaluate and improve process efficiency”.

Evgeny Agureev, deputy CEO of Alrosa, said: “The project which we started three years ago with a minor overall investment enabled us to greatly reduce the work in progress volumes of diamonds in 2021. This helped us to provide an undersupplied market with the maximum amount of rough diamonds when our clients needed them.

“Thanks to good teamwork in 2021, we were able to reduce our inventories to a record minimum of 8.4 million carats. In addition, whilst implementing the programme, we started actively developing the system for continuous improvement in our sales division.”

He added: “We will further automate sorting by developing a special software for smart management and process control. We see further potential for improvements in this area which will help drive work-in-progress inventories even lower.”