Pink diamond sold for $32m tops record Sotheby’s jewellery auction

Auction house tops previous best with Unique Pink the star of the show as market for gems starts to pick up.

Sotheby's has beaten its own world record for a jewellery sale, amassing US$175 million at an evening auction of precious stones in Geneva where a pink diamond was sold for $32m.

The Unique Pink, a 15.38-carat pear-shaped diamond, was estimated to be worth as much as $38 million. The stone was put up for sale by Ehud Laniado, who also sold the Blue Moon of Josephine, which was the most expensive polished diamond sold in auction when purchased in November 2015 for almost $50m.

"We're slowly seeing a market for diamonds going beyond jewellery and becoming an asset," Mr Laniado said. "I think that tendency will move to the big white stones as well."

The auction market has been choppy, as last week’s bellwether Impressionist, modern, postwar and contemporary art auctions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips in New York raised 50 per cent less than last year. Sotheby’s only managed to sell 53 per cent of the lots in a Geneva watch sale that raised $4m on May 14.

The Unique Pink diamond went to a phone bidder from Asia who wants to remain anonymous.

Prices for rough diamonds – what mined gems are called before they are cut and polished – slumped 18 per cent last year, the most since the financial crisis in 2008, as a stronger dollar and collapse in oil income for buyers in Russia and the Middle East outweighed record purchases in the United States. The world’s biggest and rarest diamonds tend to be more resilient to a slump in prices.

Sotheby’s set its previous record for a jewellery auction last year, when it raised $161m.

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