Blackstone aquires IGI

[DejaWiz]

Interesting news that popped up in my Google feed this morning...

Blackstone Buys IGI for Nearly $570M

The Rapaport | TradeWire® is a weekly email packaging the Rapaport Market Comment, the RapNet Diamond Index (RAPI™)

rapaport.com

 

[monarch64]

Read that yesterday. Nothing is safe from Blackstone so it’s not a huge surprise. I was kind of shocked at $570 mil sounding like a bargain. Lol

 

[Mreader]

Is this good or bad?

 

[monarch64]

Is this good or bad?

The jewelry industry is putting a positive spin on it so far:

Blackstone Officially Inks Deal to Acquire IGI

Blackstone is buying the 80 percent stake in the lab owned by a Chinese company as well as the 20 percent held by the Lorie family.

nationaljeweler.com

Blackstone acquires IGI for $569.65 Million

China's Fosun Group and Lorie Holding have successfully sold...

www.diamondworld.net

There doesn’t seem to be cause for alarm of any sort. Blackstone’s real estate division has been controversial throughout the pandemic because it came in and bought up a sh*t ton of properties and some believe that to have contributed to the housing crisis. (Too many rentals not enough homes to buy, it also jacked up prices on both rentals and single family homes.) So it sort of depends on whether you’re a fan of Blackstone or not with regard to the IGI acquisition. Vanguard invests a lot in Blackstone so if you have investments through Vanguard you’re investing in Blackstone…etc.

 

[LilAlex]

Vanguard invests a lot in Blackstone so if you have investments through Vanguard you’re investing in Blackstone…etc.

They are large cap and almost in the SP500 but not quite yet -- stay tuned. Any index fund that invests in large cap or total US stock market owns a lot of BX; Vanguard does not target them in any fashion AFAIK but BX is of course included in a lot of their index funds and VG holds about $10 trillion (?) in invested assets.

I can't believe a diamond grading lab is worth a half-billion.

 

[Lisa Loves Shiny]

This might be a silly question. I noticed IGI grading is very popular for lab diamonds. Do you think this has any bearing on the acquisition? In that they except the lab market to keep growing?

 

[DejaWiz]

This might be a silly question. I noticed IGI grading is very popular for lab diamonds. Do you think this has any bearing on the acquisition? In that they except the lab market to keep growing?

Absolutely I do. At one point, all the big players were grading LGD: GIA, AGSL, GCAL, and IGI. To me, that's confirmation that the LGD segment had grown significant enough and they all knew that growth would continue. Which is certainly is, every day.