On the business side, Harry is also very talented. In the 1950s, he was sent by his father to New York to work with many prominent advertisers on Madison Avenue, known as the center of the US advertising industry. The “4C” standard in the diamond industry – cut, color, clarity, and carat – was created by them. In fact, the so-called "4C" standard familiar to modern people is not an ancient inheritance, it is only the result of modern marketing.

Later, together with professional advertising company JWT, De Beers created the classic phrase “Diamonds forever, a eternal rumor” – in 2000, this slogan was named the most successful advertisement in the 20th century. Copywriting.

In the era of Harry, Anglo American dominated South Africa's diamond, gold and platinum industries and the entire South African business world. With the strong cash flow generated by De Beers, Anglo American is able to acquire more minerals; and the gains from gold, platinum and other metal mining can be invested in other areas...

The Oppenheimer family's career reached its fullest in Harry's hands: Anglo-American Gold and Anglo Platinum became the world's largest producers of gold and platinum, respectively, and Miloco became one of the world's top ten copper producers; in the 1970s, Austria The output value of all companies under the Benheimer family accounts for 10% of South Africa's GDP, and exports account for 30% of South Africa's total exports... The Oppenheimer family has become South Africa's “China China”.

Prior to the 1980s, De Beers controlled 90% of the world's rough diamond sales. The CSO in London, which holds only 10 diamond appreciation sessions a year, has only 125 exhibitors who have long-term cooperation with De Beers. They are called "De Beers 125". The sightholders bought the rough from the hands of De Beers, then polished them to loose diamonds and sold them to jewelry retailers. Since the inception of CSO, De Beers has been implementing the “choice of the customer's supply strategy”: he chooses the customer, not the customer. Based on this premise, he gave the customer the rough diamond, the customer has no room for bargaining, can only indicate "yes" or "don't".

However, as a large number of diamond mines were discovered in Australia, Canada and Russia, South Africa's status as a diamond kingdom gradually faltered after the 1980s. De Beers’ market share was once squeezed to 45%. Forced to helpless, Harry took the initiative to break the "De Beers 125" limit, expanding the market from the original high-end customers to the middle class, and advertised like a daily consumer goods, adopting a variety of flexible marketing methods.

By the end of the 20th century, De Beers had successfully transformed into a market-oriented non-monopoly company, and its market share has also rebounded.

The Oppenheimer family has such a family training: "We hope that the best things will happen, and we will do the worst." It seems that Harry has realized the essence of this family training.

From monopoly to competition

If Harry's contribution to the family business is to expand the market by breaking the high-end barrier, then his son Niki Oppenheimer goes one step further and pushes the company to the modern business model.

In 1998, when the 52-year-old Nikki became the new head of the family, there was a media bluntly saying that he "had a brains that are not very useful, I am afraid it is difficult to shoulder this burden." But the facts quickly proved that the media was wrong.

Under Nikki's leadership, De Beers partnered with the well-known luxury goods group Louis Vuitton to start involved in the diamond retail industry. This move has made De Beers's industrial chain longer and has brought more profit to De Beers – diamond jewelry sales are more profitable than diamond mining.

In addition, Nikki has changed the CSO that has existed for decades to the domestic diamond commerce company (DTC) and launched a strategy called “Best Supplier”. At the core of this strategy is to provide more added value to the warehousing and downstream distributors and retailers, and then to attract these downstream companies to De Beers, to advance and retreat, and to enhance the impact on the entire industry. force. The "Best Supplier" strategy proved to be successful. In 2004, global diamond jewelry sales continued to grow by 8% compared to 2003, when diamond prices rose by 7%. The "Best Supplier" strategy case was also listed as one of the classic cases by Harvard Business School.

In the history of family development, the most important thing that Niki did was in 2000. This year, Nikki proposed that the Oppenheimer family and Anglo American will jointly invest $19.7 billion to acquire De Beers. For this acquisition, Niki has been brewing for a long time. Eliminating cross-shareholdings is the main motivation for restructuring. For more than 70 years, De Beers has been cross-shared with Anglo American, with the former having 35% of the latter and the latter having 32% of the former. This cross-shareholding is criticized by investors, and the capital market is therefore less valued for De Beers. "The value of De Beers has always been undervalued by investors," said Nikki. Since shareholders do not recognize the value of De Beers, there is no need for companies to continue to make profits for them.

In May 2001, the reorganization was completed. The Oppenheimer and Anglo American companies each hold a 45% stake in De Beers, and the remaining 10% are joint ventures between De Beers and the Botswana government. Bills Botswana company owns. This is the largest restructuring of the world diamond industry since World War II and the largest corporate acquisition in the history of South Africa's economy. Since then, De Beers has ended his 100-year history of trading on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and became a private company.

Many people believe that De Beers will become more mysterious and arrogant after privatization. A diamond analyst pessimistically said that the outside world may no longer know how much the actual profit of the diamond industry is. However, at the end of July 2003, just two years after De Beers delisted, Nikki announced the company's mid-year performance statement for the year. This move is seen as a sign that De Beers is trying to prove that it is becoming increasingly transparent. “The world has changed,” Niki said. “When we started to change, we became more open and transparent, and the sky did not fall.”

Although he learned from the university, Nikki accepted the same aristocratic education as his father, but compared with the father of a gentleman, Niki looked a bit unruly. He never wears expensive diamond watches, but he often wears a plastic electronic watch; he likes to play cricket and buys a professional cricket team. When the media asks him why he buys a team, his answer It’s fascinating: “That’s the only way I can feel the competition now.”

In 2008, Forbes ranked the world's most prominent 14 wealth families, and the Oppenheimer family was among them. Today, Niki's only son, Jonathan Oppenheimer, is 41 years old and has three children. The fourth generation of the family has begun to get involved in the management of the family business. However, in the hands of the next generation of the third generation or the fourth generation, whether the Oppenheimer family can still equate with the diamond dynasty is not known.

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