De Beers Supply Chain

De Beers |

The World of the Diamond, a multiple complex dimension and interactions |

|

|

* De Beers, a major player in the diamond industry

De Beers is a very well-known company in the jewelry sector. It’s a conglomerate of several diamond mines in Africa principally. The company was found by a young asthmatic English boy aged of 17 years old Cecil Rhodes. Cecil Rhodes found the De Beers Company after he bought the landscape of two brothers located in the Kimberley valley named De Beer. As you can remark, their name did not wear an ‘s’. Cecil Rhodes gave the name with the ‘s’ because in 11 years from his arrival in 1871 and 1888 he was earning a lot of different diamond land. Only one person could compete with him, it was the Kimberley Central Mining Co owned by Barney Barnato. In a couple of years, Barney Barnato gets forced to sell his company to Rhodes and that was the beginning of the De Beers supremacy called “De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd”.

Figure 1- De Beers Group structure

Therefore, De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd has almost a monopoly of the diamond in South Africa controlling 90% of the production of rough diamonds at the time. As for Rhodes, from 1889, he pursued a career politician and businessman who led him to be Prime Minister of the Cape Province in 1980 and to extend the British Empire on the territories of the now Zambia and Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, named in honor of Mr. Rhodes. He died near Cape Town March 26, 1902, but was buried in the Matopos Hills in Zimbabwe. The biggest rough diamond in the world, named Cullinan, 3106 carats (10 x 6 x 5 cm, more than 621.2 grams) was discovered in South Africa in 1905. It was so named because the mine where it was found belonged to Thomas Cullinan. This little gem was bought by the Transvaal government was offered to King Edward VII of England for his birthday November 9, 1907, a good way to seal the Boers(term for farmers) permanent peace with the British Empire.

Today, South...