Running head:
Social Performance of Organizations
Assignment 1: Social Performance of Organizations
Tatiana Dunklin
Business and Society 475
Instructor: Daniel Goldsmith, DBA
May 1. 2016
Assignment 1: Social Performance of Organizations
The De Beers Company is considered to be one of the many wealthiest companies in the world.
De Beers primes and dominates the diamond industry in diamond mining, trading, and industrial
manufacturing of diamonds today. A man by the name of Cecil Rhodes from south Africa created
De Beers in the late 1871. Rhodes leased water pumps to miners then invested his profits by
purchasing small mining operations. In the year 2011 the De Beers Group sold their remaining
stake to Anglo American for five point one billion in cash. (DeMarco, 2011). Before the sale the
diamond company was owned by the Oppenheimer family. Now Anglo American own eighty-
five percent of De Beers making them the primary stockholder while the Republic of Botswana
owns the remaining fifteen percent of this company as a whole.
Mining diamonds involves a lot of factors that can effect a company’s external environment. In
the case of the De Beers Diamond Company the two most important factors to the organization’s
external environment are globalization and trade, and the perception of society.
Salient Stakeholders
A company needs many factors to come in place when producing diamonds. Many people show
a major role in insuring the value of the diamond. Three groups that have important stakes in De
Beer Diamond Company are the stockholders, governments, and customers.
One of the key stakeholders for the De Beers Company are the stockholders. In majority of
companies the most important part of business is making profit. The stockholders in the De
Beers Company had a large influence on the diamond industry and made De Beers a monopoly.
These stockholders do a great job scheduling on how to keep the company making big profits.
This provides these stockholders loads of control. De Beers has done a great job increasing their
markets and making sure those places have high demand for the product. In an article on
Telegraph.co.uk, Josephine Moulds states De Beer’s “sales in the Middle East, India and Asia
drove pre-tax profits up seventy-four percent to one billion in the first half (Moulds, 2011).
The governments in the diamond industry have major control of what the companies can
do. When mining diamonds many of land and resources are used. Governments have to take the
interest of their people and also take into account what impact the diamond industry has on the
local environment. In the country of Angola diamond mining has had a huge impact.
