Eight months after loosening restrictions on diamond sales, the Democratic Republic of Congo has returned to Antwerp, the historic hub of the global diamond trade, with a public auction led by one of its largest producers.

Société Anhui Congo d’Investissement Minier, known as Sacim, sold 288,000 carats of industrial diamonds in a public tender held in Antwerp from Feb. 16 to 20, 2026. The sale was confirmed by the Congolese Consulate General in the Belgian city.

The auction was coordinated with the technical support of Samir Gems, a Belgian diamond and jewelry trading company, and the Antwerp World Diamond Centre. Sixty-seven international companies participated, with leading buyers from China, India, the United States and Italy.

The Consulate described the transaction as marking the return of Congolese industrial diamonds to the Antwerp market after more than a decade of interruption. However, official trade statistics for 2024 and 2025 list Belgium among the importers of Congolese industrial diamonds, with 3.96 million and 1.7 million carats imported, respectively.

According to the Consulate, a technical meeting between Sacim, Samir Gems and the Antwerp World Diamond Centre established an annual calendar for future public sales. The plan includes technical and institutional support measures intended to secure a lasting Congolese presence in Antwerp, a strategic marketplace for rough diamonds.

The sale comes eight months after Congo liberalized diamond marketing rules for local producers. In June 2025, then-Mines Minister Kizito Pakabomba repealed a 2022 ministerial order that had governed the sale of mineral substances under the supervision of the Center for Expertise, Evaluation and Certification of Precious and Semi-Precious Mineral Substances, known as CEEC.

That framework limited producers to a restricted list of buyers, a system seen as capable of influencing prices. Sacim, a major player in Congo’s diamond sector, considered itself among the companies most affected by those restrictions.

The terms of the Antwerp sale were not disclosed. Official mining statistics for 2025 nonetheless indicate an improvement in Sacim’s average sale price compared with broader market trends. In 2024, when the average price stood at $9.63 per carat, Sacim recorded an average of $11.38. In 2025, the company maintained an average price of $11 per carat, even as the overall average fell to $7.4. Natural diamond prices have been in steady decline for several years.

According to official data, Sacim’s exports — the company is jointly owned by Anhui Foreign Economic Construction Corporation of China and the Congolese state — were cut in half, falling from 2,887,100.25 carats in 2024 to 1,151,865.58 carats in 2025. The company accounted for 13.5 percent of national production, with just over 1.1 million carats produced.

Ronsard Luabeya, Bankable