CaratSarine's revenue fell 6%. Its loss grew 21 times.
Sarine Technologies took $14.4 million in the first half against a net loss of $3.5 million, where a year earlier the loss was $166,000. Revenue fell about $0.9 million. The deficit widened by $3.3 million.
§1A frightening multiple off a tiny base.
Sarine Technologies reported its first half of 2026 on 11 August with revenue of $14.4 million, down 6% on the year, and a net loss of $3.5 million against a loss of $166,000 in the same half of 2025. No dividend was declared. Dividing one deficit by the other gives 21.1 times, this desk's arithmetic on the company's two published figures, and the multiple is the number every summary of these results has led with. It is also the least useful number in them, because a loss that starts at $166,000 will produce a frightening multiple out of almost any deterioration. The figure worth holding is the distance between the two smaller numbers underneath it.
Take 6% off the published revenue and the first half of 2025 comes out at roughly $15.3 million, which puts this half's revenue decline at about $0.9 million. The deficit widened by $3.334 million over the same period. That is a loss growing by something close to three and a half times the fall in revenue, all of it this desk's arithmetic on rounded published figures. The loss did not come from the top line. The company names two causes and only one of them is a diamond-market fact: operating expenses rose, driven by a weaker US dollar against the Israeli shekel, and natural-diamond processing volumes fell against lab-grown competition. A currency move between Washington and Tel Aviv is not a verdict on the polishing floor, and it is carrying a large share of this result.
§2Where the money actually went.
The growth lines run the other way and they are not small. Revenue from GCAL grading rose more than 50% in the half. Revenue from the MVP rough-planning service more than doubled. Kitov.ai, the industrial-inspection associate in which Sarine holds 33%, booked $1.5 million of revenue and also more than doubled. Those are the recurring-service lines the company has spent years pivoting towards, and they grew through a half in which the group lost twenty-one times what it lost a year earlier. The shape is a business whose new revenue is compounding off a base still too small to cover what the old one is giving up, which is a slower and more ordinary problem than a 21-fold multiple suggests.
The loss did not come from the top line
§3An instrument, not a company.
For anyone outside the technology end of the trade, Sarine is worth reading as an instrument rather than a company. It sells the scanning, planning and grading that stones pass through on the way to a polished parcel, so its revenue tracks how many stones are being worked, not how many are being sold at retail. The company's own framing is that a 6% revenue decline is modest against a significantly greater contraction in rough supply, and if that holds, the factories processed a larger share of a smaller pile. This paper published global rough production down 8% to 98.8 million carats in 2025 on 27 July, and yesterday reported Lucara selling 24% fewer carats in its second quarter. A 6% fall at the machine end against those two figures is the more encouraging reading available in this release.
The loss did not come from the top line, and a trade paper that prints the 21-fold multiple without that sentence has told its readers the opposite of what happened. The processing floor held up better than rough supply did. What broke was the cost side, and a shekel that will not stay where the budget assumed is a problem Sarine can hedge rather than a signal about diamonds. The number to watch in the second half is not the deficit but whether GCAL and MVP keep compounding at these rates, because the arithmetic only turns when the recurring lines are big enough to absorb a currency move without the group noticing. Until they are, this company will keep reporting the diamond market's weather and its own bank's weather in the same sentence.
The trade, filed to your inbox before the New York open.
Prices, tenders and the one story that moved the industry overnight — read in ninety seconds.
Subscribe free →