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De Beers, often mentioned in one breath with diamonds, is a company founded by Cecil Rhodes. This company is not just another company in the diamond sector. The company has made the sector namely tot what it means today. Where it all began: a man with a dream which involved to dominate the world of diamonds! Rhodes began in 1867 with renting water pumps to miners in South Africa. At that time, the "diamond rush" was fully underway. He extended his domain and became the owner of all diamond demining operation across whole country. Eventually he built the company into a diamond group with the support of the Rothschild family. The De Beers group is not only for the demining of diamonds and organizing their own sales, but also provides its own distribution. The distribution is handled by different entities grouped under the name "Diamond trading Company". When Rhodes came to die in 1927, Ernest Oppenheimer took the chair. De Beers and its monopoly in the diamond sector You cannot just trade with the company. You have to follow their process completely. First of all the diamonds are sold on "Sights", which take place 10 times a year. You can only get here when you are a sight holder. Those people are the diamond merchants who will grind and polish the diamonds and will resell them in Antwerp, New York and Tel Aviv. The group was known in the 20th century as a major monopoly in the diamond industry. This way De Beers could put the international trade in diamonds to her hand. TO achieve this monopoly they convinced companies to join the group and they bought diamonds from other producers in order to determine the market prices by stock management. De Beers after the Millennium: a hard battle has begun! In 2000 the company was forced to chance their business model. This because of the producers in Russia, Canada and Australia, who decided to sell their diamonds outside the channels of De Beers. Also the increasing public awareness of "blood diamonds" did no good to their position. The market share of De Beers dropped from 85% in the 80's to 40% in 2012. Anglo American plc became owner of the company in 2011, when the Oppenheimer family announced to sell 40% of their shares to this organization. De Beers is listed as a Luxembourg company with two shareholders. Firstly the government of Botwana owns 15%; furthermore the Anglo American plc owns the other 85%
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diamond, de beers, oppenheimer, rhodes,
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