CaratLucara sold the 2,488-carat Motswedi and published no price
The world's second-largest rough diamond has traded at an undisclosed figure, its proceeds folded into a quarter that fell 6% to $41.0 million. The comparison the trade will reach for is nine years old.
§1A record stone, sold quietly.
Lucara Diamond has sold the Motswedi, the 2,488-carat rough recovered at its Karowe mine in Botswana in 2024 and the second-largest diamond ever found, and has not said what it was paid. The stone weighed 2,488 carats after cleaning, against the 2,492 carats first reported. The proceeds sit inside the company's second-quarter results rather than being disclosed separately. The report is ten days old as it prints here. This paper has written about the stone twice, in July as a recovery and on 12 August as part of Lucara's quarter, and neither occasion carried a sale.
What fills the space where the price should be is a comparison the company itself invited and then qualified. The reference point is the 1,109-carat Lesedi La Rona, also from Karowe, which Graff bought for $53 million in 2017. Lucara's chief executive William Lamb has said the Motswedi "was not as white as the 1,109-carat Lesedi La Rona" and contained inclusions that reflected brown tones. That is a chief executive managing an expectation downward before anybody can set it, and it is the most useful thing said about the stone's value in public, because it fixes the direction of the comparison without giving the number.
§2What fills the space where a price should be.
The quarter it lands in is a soft one. Lucara reported $41.0 million of revenue for the second quarter, down 6% on the $43.7 million of a year earlier. The Motswedi's proceeds are inside that figure, which sets a ceiling on the stone rather than a price: whatever it made, it was not enough to lift a quarter above the prior year. That is the only quantitative bound the disclosure permits, and it is worth stating plainly because it is real information. This paper reported on 12 August that Lucara's price per carat rose 24% in the same period while diamond prices generally fell, and the two facts fit together only if the mix was carrying the average.
A stone that size has no comparables and now it has no price either
§3The comparison set gets thinner.
A stone that size has no comparables and now it has no price either. There have been very few diamonds over 2,000 carats in the modern record, and one of them has just traded in the dark. For a trade that prices everything off a reference, the absence reaches past Lucara: the next exceptional rough recovered anywhere will be negotiated against a comparison set with one fewer point in it than it should have. The Lesedi La Rona's $53 million is nine years old and describes a whiter stone in a different market. It is now doing more work than a nine-year-old number should have to do.
An undisclosed price is a commercial right and it is also a transfer. The buyer keeps what it paid to itself, the seller avoids publishing a figure that might have disappointed, and the cost lands on every miner who recovers the next great stone and has to argue its value from a comparison set that is thinning. Lucara has recovered more of these than anyone, which makes its silence more consequential than most houses' would be. The quarter tells us the sale was not transformative. The chief executive tells us the stone was not as good as the one that made $53 million. Between those two statements sits a number the market can bracket but cannot read, and bracketing is not pricing.
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