De Beers Mining Company

The De Beers Group of Companies

Industry	Mining and trading of diamonds
Genre	Businesses
Founded	1888
Founder	Cecil Rhodes
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Mark Cutifani (Chairman) Bruce Cleaver (CEO)
Products	Diamonds
Services	Diamond marketing and promotion. Community development.
Revenue	$4.7 Billion (FY 2015)
Owner	Anglo American
Number of employees	20,000+
Website	debeersgroup.com

The De Beers Group of Companies has a leading role in the diamond exploration, diamond mining, diamond retail, diamond trading and industrial diamond manufacturing sectors. The company is currently active in open-pit, large-scale alluvial, coastal and deep sea mining. The company operates in 28 countries and mining takes place in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Canada. Until the start of the 21st century, De Beers effectively had total control over the diamond market as both a monopoly and monopsony of diamonds. Opposition has since dismantled the complete monopoly, though De Beers is still a large shareholder and currently sells approximately 35% of the world's rough diamond production through its Global Sightholder Sales and Auction Sales businesses.

The company was founded in 1888 by British businessman Cecil Rhodes, who was financed by the South African diamond magnate Alfred Beit and the London-based N M Rothschild & Sons bank. In 1926, Ernest Oppenheimer, a German immigrant to Britain who had earlier founded mining giant Anglo American plc with American financier J.P. Morgan, was elected to the board of De Beers. He built and consolidated the company's global monopoly over the diamond industry until his death in 1957. During this time, he was involved in a number of controversies, including price fixing, trust behaviour and an allegation of not releasing industrial diamonds for the U.S. war effort during World War II.

The name "De Beers" was derived from the two Dutch settlers and brothers Diederik Arnoldus De Beer (December 25, 1825 – 1878) and Johannes Nicolaas De Beer (December 6, 1830 – June 20, 1883), who owned a South African farm named Vooruitzicht (Dutch for "outlook") near Zandfontein in the Boshof District, Orange Free State. After they discovered diamonds on their land, the increasing demands of the British government forced them to sell their farm on July 31, 1871, to merchant Alfred Johnson Ebden (1820–1908) for 6,600 GBP. Vooruitzicht would become the site of the Big Hole and the De Beer Mine, two successful diamond mines. Their name, which was given to one of the mines, subsequently became associated with the company.