The De Beers Group is a South African- British corporation that specializes in diamond mining, diamond exploitation, diamond retail, diamond inscription and grading services, diamond trading and industrial diamond manufacturing sectors. The company is active in open-pit, underground, large-scale alluvial and coastal mining. It operates in 35 countries with mining taking place in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Canada. It also has an artisanal mining business, Gemfair, which operates in Sierra Leone.

Diamond is a solid form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal structure called diamond cubic. Another solid form of carbon known as graphite is the chemically stable form of carbon at room temperature and pressure, but diamond is metastable and converts to it at a negligible rate under those conditions. Diamond has the highest hardness and thermal conductivity of any natural material, properties that are used in major industrial applications such as cutting and polishing tools. They are also the reason that diamond anvil cells can subject materials to pressures found deep in the Earth.