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1.1 Company Background公司背景
这是在初夏的2007，当时李·曼德尔决定向交往四年的女友戴安娜求婚。作为一个浪漫的人，李想在烛光晚餐中提出这个意愿，包括在来一瓶波尔多酒。然而，在哪里购买特殊戒指和什么类型的钻石和部分细节在他心目中还是不太确定的。
李和戴安娜最近租看了一部电影《血钻》，该片于1990年代在塞拉利昂内战爆发时，而反革命组织联合阵线依靠走私钻石的收益为其军事行动提供资金。11年的战争终于结束在2002年，导致成千上万的人死亡和超过200万人流离失所，近1/3的人口消失。戴安娜和李都被这部电影讲述的故事所困扰：苦难和暴力，被招募入伍的孩子们，以及全世界数亿人、男人和女人想过的宝石生活。
It was early summer 2007 and Lee Mandell decided that the time was right to propose to Diane, his girlfriend of four years. Being the romantic he was, Lee wanted to pop the question over a candle light dinner that included an exceptional bottle of Bordeaux. Logistical details of where to buy the special ring and what type of diamond, however, were less certain in his mind.
Lee and Diane had recently rented the movie Blood Diamond, set in Sierra Leone in the 1990s when a civil war was raging and the rebel group, the Revolutionary United Front, relied on proceeds from smuggled diamonds to finance its military operation. The 11-year war, which ended in 2002, resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands and the displacement of more than 2 million people, nearly onethird of the country’s population. Both Diane and Lee had been disturbed by the story the movie told, the hardship and violence, the children who were forcibly recruited to fight, and the lives that were destroyed all over gems that were worn by hundreds of millions of people, men and women alike, throughout the world.
As he thought about his options, Lee recalled a magazine article he had recently read about the growing market for synthetic diamonds. The article described the process by which diamonds could be grown in a laboratory environment, far from the war torn lands of Africa. Chemically, lab-grown diamonds were identical to diamonds that were extracted from the ground. Instead of taking millions or billions of years to form, hundreds of miles underground, however, a laboratory environment could produce a flawless diamond within days.
Lee was starting to think that a synthetic diamond was a great alternative. But how would Diane react upon learning he had bought her a diamond that was made in a laboratory just outside of Boston? Would she be relieved and touched by his humanitarian and eco-friendly purchase or would she wonder if the 20% to 40% he would save by buying a synthetic diamond was an indication of the depth of his love?
For producers of synthetic diamonds, it was consumers like Lee Mandell that proved there was a market demand for an alternative to the natural diamond. But for South Africa-based DeBeers, which up until the late 1990s single-handedly controlled the world’s supply of diamonds, Lee’s rationale was misguided and he was giving his girlfriend nothing more than costume jewelry. Nevertheless, the fact of the matter was that people were buying lab-produced diamonds and the number doing so was growing at a faster rate than those buying those extracted from the ground.
The dilemma that DeBeers faced came down to whether it should enter the market with its own synthetic diamonds or whether it should have faith that synthetics would be a passing fad and that, at the end of the day, consumers would always prefer buying what, in DeBeers’s mind, was the real thing. Complicating the company’s dilemma, however, was the fact that it was in the
