Tennis ball-sized Lesedi diamond sold for $53m

Size isn’t everything in the diamond market, especially for the biggest gem found in more than a century and which took a year to sell.

Lucara Diamond finally sold the 1,109-carat Lesedi La Rona diamond for $53m (€44.6m), or $47,777 a carat, to Graff Diamonds, Vancouver-based Lucara said.

While it’s significantly bigger than the 813-carat Constellation stone Lucara found at the same time, that stone sold for a record $63m, or about $77,500 a carat. The fate of the Lesedi, or “our light” in the Tswana language spoken in Botswana, is a good example of how size isn’t the most important factor in the diamond industry.