In 2014, the Partnership generated a total revenue of US$6.9 billion. The way in which this revenue was distributed is illustrated in Figure 8.
FIGURE 8: BREAKDOWN OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE PARTNERSHIP’S REVENUES, 2014
US$0.3 billion was paid in wages to employees and US$0.6 billion was paid for goods and services to suppliers in Botswana and overseas. In addition, US$2.2 billion was paid to the Government through taxes, royalties and dividends, while US$0.7 billion was available for distribution to shareholders in the form of dividends. Capital expenditure accounted for US$0.5 billion, part of which was used to extend the life of the mines. The largest proportion, however, was the US$2.3 billion spent on diamond imports, which involved buying diamonds from De Beers’ entities in Namibia, Canada and South Africa to bring them to Gaborone for aggregation by DBGSS in order to be sold to Sightholders in Botswana. The remaining US$0.3 billion was kept as retained earnings and other items, which includes retained earnings and other unrealised non-cash items such as forex losses/gains.
The following sections explain the economic impact of the Partnership’s revenue distribution on Botswana.
FIGURE 9: MEASURES OF ECONOMIC CONTRIBUTION
34 GVA is the company-level and sector-level equivalent of GDP and adding up the GVA of all individual sectors in the economy gets you to a country’s GDP (after adjusting for taxes and subsidies on products.