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......Monopoly status
In 1990, De Beers diamond inventory was evaluated at $5bn and at that point in time the company was distributing roughly 80% of the world output of diamonds, being the undeniable market leader of the industy and also an unapologetic monopolist (Nocera, 2008), whose purpose was to maintain the price of diamonds high by controlling the supply. The company had offices in a large number of African countries, which generate most of the diamond output, thus enabling the monolopy to collect almost all the stones as they were mines. Some of these stones were later sold to diamond retailers just enough to meet a small part of the demand. According to Porter et. al. (2007), the world demand for diamond was in excess 1.2bn carats in 2000, which corresponds to more than 10 times the production of natural diamonds (Olson, 2002). The practice of buying inventory and selling only a small part of it had a major effect on world supply, this later one being kept to a very small level. The strong, intense marketing activity meant to associate diamonds with something small and precious stimulated an artificial demand for these stones. In 1947, the company lauched one

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