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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Monday was a so-so 75-72-163 as the TSX Venture Exchange fell fractionally to 653. Dermot Desmond and Mark Wall's Mountain Province Diamonds Inc. (MPVD) closed unchanged at six cents on 108,000 shares. The company revealed its first quarter sales and production data for its 49-per-cent-owned Gahcho Kue mine in the Northwest Territories and the numbers were about as gloomy as expected.

Mining at Gahcho Kue did not occur in the first quarter -- other than the planned stripping work to access the high-grade NEX orebody -- but processing of stockpiled kimberlite continued at full pace. Over 925,000 tonnes of kimberlite were put through the plant, a healthy pace that translates to about 3.7 million tonnes per year. Unfortunately, the grade was low at just 82 carats per hundred tonnes -- roughly half of what the mine has averaged over its eight-year life to date.

And so, the carat crop was just shy of 763,000 carats -- an annualized rate of barely three million carats per year -- of which just 374,000 carats were Mountain Province's portion. Meanwhile, the company sold just over 426,000 carats for $30.7-million (U.S.), which translates to an average value of $72 (U.S.) per carat. Yes, that is barely half of what the company expected at its ribbon cutting ceremony in 2016, and yes, it is substantially below the $132 (U.S.) per carat that the company achieved in the first quarter of 2022, when rough diamond prices hit a record high. Still, it is marginally better than the $70 (U.S.) per carat that the company managed a year ago.

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