Charlotte Mathews
14 July 2008
Johannesburg — A $100m private equity fund launched by De Beers' industrial diamonds subsidiary, Element 6, had made four investments so far and is expected to close another four deals in the next few months, E6 Ventures head Brendon Grunewald said last week .
He was responding to a report in the Financial Times in which Element 6 CE Christian Hultner said it was hoped the fund, which is financed by Element 6, would attract another $400m in outside investments in the next few years.
De Beers owns 60% of Element 6 and Belgian minerals group Umicore owns 40%.
Element 6 supplies synthetic diamonds and other superabrasives to the engineering industry, mainly for use in cutting tools. It has a turnover of almost $500m a year.
Hultner told the Financial Times he hoped to double Element 6's revenue by 2013.
Element 6 announced in March it had established the fund to invest in companies using artificial diamonds in innovative ways.
Grunewald said it was not an innovation fund but a private equity fund, since it invested in companies rather than new technologies.
There had been a lot of interest in using synthetic diamonds in a range of new applications from electronics to medical devices, he said.
One of the companies in which the Element 6 fund has invested is Advanced Oxidation, a British company that uses artificial diamonds to generate electrical current to degrade chemical pollutants.
Element 6's website mentions its investments in Diamond Microwave Devices, which is developing diamond semiconductor materials and processing technology for civil and defence systems.
It also mentions Diamond Detectors, which develops sensors for high-energy physics, ionising radiation and deepultraviolet monitoring.
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