Worldwide Gemological Institute (IGI) CEO Roland Lorie has confirmed a Jan. 12 Bloomberg report that mentioned that proprietor Fosun Group was contemplating a sale of the Antwerp, Belgium–based mostly grading lab.

“Shareholders consider IGI is [poised] to enter a brand new development section and are at present reviewing candidate buyers to additional develop the corporate imaginative and prescient,” Lorie tells JCK.

He provides that IGI will stay an unbiased firm run by the CEO and its managers.

China’s Fosun Group owns 80% of the lab, via its subsidiary Shanghai Yuyuan Vacationer Mart Co., and Lorie and his household personal the opposite 20%.

Fosun Group purchased its majority stake in IGI in 2018 for $108.8 million

The Bloomberg report, which quoted unnamed sources, mentioned that Fosun had valued the lab at 200 million euros ($215 million). It reported that Fosun had recruited Deutsche Financial institution for assist with the gross sales course of.

Fosun, one in all China’s largest non-state-owned conglomerates, has already introduced plans to promote $11 billion in noncore property over the subsequent 12 months.

Lorie says the change is going on after IGI skilled a number of “fruitful years of development.”

He provides: “This doable change is, for the whole IGI group, a really thrilling problem, and as CEO I’m satisfied we are going to obtain even higher outcomes sooner or later.”

Based in 1975, IGI at present has greater than 25 places all through the world.

This has been a interval of bizarre enterprise exercise on the planet of gem grading labs. On Jan. 11, Israeli tools maker Sarine Applied sciences introduced it had signed a nonbinding settlement to buy a majority share within the Gem Certification & Assurance Lab (GCAL). And final 12 months, the American Gem Society closed its 26-year-old diamond grading lab. Its operations have been folded into these of its longtime rival, the Gemological Institute of America.

Shanghai Yuyuan Vacationer Mart Co. didn’t reply to a request for remark by publication time.

Photograph courtesy of Worldwide Gemological Institute

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