[miningmx.com] — DE BEERS is ditching the De Beers Consolidated Mines
(DBCM) brand some 125 years into the company’s existence. The decision is part of
a
group-wide effort to simplify all the disparate brands in the organisation which also
sees the Diamond Trading Company (DTC) and Diamdel brands replaced by De Beers
Sightholder Sales and De Beers Auction Sales respectively.
At face value, the rebranding process, in which De Beers Canada also disappears but
the ForeverMark retail footprint continues, seems like tinkering. “So what: they are
changing their stationery,’ said an analyst. “The real question is what De Beers plans
to do behind those organisations, how will it operate differently,’ he says.
De Beers isn’t quite saying, or is being tantalisingly evasive about why ditching DBCM
for the De Beers name is necessary. In a letter to sightholders – those anointed to
buy the diamond group’s 34 million carat per year rough or unpolished diamonds at 10
meetings annually, known as sights – Varda Shine, CEO of the DTC, said: “This is a
corporate identity realignment – not a structural realignment’. She also said the
changes were “subtle, but important’.
Says Lynette Gould, spokesperson for De Beers in London: “We are taking this step
to
realign our corporate identity because we cannot expect to be the market leader if
we
cannot present one clear, consistent and co-ordinated message to our customers
and
partners. The gradual phasing-out of the DTC and Diamdel brands will also be an
important part of De Beers becoming a more customer-focused organisation.’
Shine hinted at the importance of customer focus when commenting on why
negotiating its way out of the various anti-trust suits in the US at a cost of $295m
was
a pivotal development. The group’s executives could now visit customers in their own
factories in the US, she said.
This is not the first time De Beers has turned introspective. The formation of DTC
was
considered an milestone as the group abandoned its rather haughty Central Selling
Organisation (CSO) which was anything but customer focused. Polishers and cutters
lucky enough to be sightholders accepted goods on a “take-it-or-leave-it’ basis.
Establishing the DTC was explained in global market terms: De Beers was no longer
the only game in town and in this newly competitive landscape it was important to
drive margins by giving the customer more service. Gone, too, was the CSO’s almost
umbrella coverage of the diamond market. It would no longer take sole responsibility
for marketing diamonds to retail customers; other producers of diamonds had to
shoulder the responsibility.
One wonders though, with all this talk of leadership position, whether it’s De Beers’
newly dominant shareholder, Anglo American, that sees an opportunity to revert De
Beers, in different terms, to a custodianship of the diamond market, especially since
Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton are leaving the diamond industry. It would provide Anglo a
rare opportunity to position itself as a market leader in at least one growth mining
sector.
– The article was first published in Finweek.
