Royal Dutch Shell

Royal Dutch Shell

 

    Royal Dutch Shell plc , commonly known as Shell, is a global oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its  registered office at the Shell Centre in London, United Kingdom. It is the largest energy company and the second largest company in the  world measured by revenues and is one of the six oil and gas "supermajors".  
 
 

      It has operations in over 90 countries, produces around 3.1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day and has 44,000 service stations worldwide. Shell Oil Company, its subsidiary in the United States, is one of its largest businesses. 

      Its primary listing is on the London Stock Exchange and it is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It has secondary listings on Euronext Amsterdam and the New York Stock Exchange.

 

       The Royal Dutch Shell Group was created in February 1907 when the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company (legal name in Dutch, N.V. Koninklijke Nederlandsche Petroleum Maatschappij) and the "Shell" Transport and Trading Company Ltd of the United Kingdom merged their operations – a move largely driven by the need to compete globally with the then predominant US petroleum company, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. The terms of the merger gave 60% of the new Group to the Dutch arm and 40% to the British. 
 
 

History 

      The "Shell" Transport and Trading     Company (the quotation marks were part of the legal name) was a British company, founded in 1897 by Marcus Samuel and his brother Samuel Samuel. Initially the Company commissioned eight oil tankers for the purposes of transporting oil.

 

      Around 1953, Shell was the first company to purchase and use an electronic computer in the Netherlands. The computer, a Ferranti Mark 1 Star, was assembled and used at the Shell laboratory in Amsterdam. 

      In November 2004, following a period of turmoil caused by the revelation that Shell had been overstating its oil reserves, it was announced that the Shell Group would move to a single capital structure, creating a new parent company to be named Royal Dutch Shell plc. The unification was completed on 20 July 2005. 

      In November 2007 Shell acquired a majority stake in some gas fields owned by Regal Petroleum in Ukraine. 

      In March 2010, Shell announced selling of some of its assets, including its liquid petroleum gas (LPG) business, to meet the cost of a planned $28bn capital spending programme. Shell has invited buyers to submit indicative bids, due by 22 March, company will raise $2–3bn from the sale. 

      In June 2010, Royal Dutch Shell agreed to acquire all of the business of East Resources for a cash consideration of $4.7 billion. The transaction includes East Resources Tight Gas Fields.

   
Name and brand  
 
 
 

 The Shell brand is one of the most familiar commercial symbols in the world. Known as the "pecten" after the sea shell Pecten maximus (the giant scallop), on which its design is based, the current version of the brand was designed by Raymond Loewy and introduced in 1971. The yellow and red colours used are thought to relate to the colours of the flag of Spain as Shell built early service stations in the state of California which had strong connections with Spain.Business Superbrands, Editor: Marcel Knobil, Author James Curtis (2000), Superbrands Ltd.

       The slash was removed from the name "Royal Dutch/Shell" in 2004, concurrent with moves to merge the two legally separate companies (Royal Dutch and Shell) to the single legal entity which exists today. 
 
 

      The name Shell is linked to the Shell Transport and Trading Company. In 1833, the founder's father, also Marcus Samuel, founded an import business to sell seashells to London collectors. When collecting seashell specimens in the Caspian Sea area in 1892, the younger Samuel realized there was potential in exporting lamp oil from the region and commissioned the world's first purpose-built oil tanker, the Murex (Latin for a type of snail shell), to enter this market; by 1907 the company had a fleet. Although for several decades the company had a refinery at Shell Haven on the Thames, there is no evidence of this having provided the name. 

Core businesses 
 

       Shell has five core businesses: exploration and production (the "upstream"), gas and power, refining and marketing(the "downstream"), chemicals, and trading and shipping. The company operates in more than 140 countries. 
 
 

      Shell's primary business is the management of a vertically integrated oil company. The development of technical and commercial expertise in all the stages of this vertical integration from the initial search for oil (exploration) through its harvesting (production), transportation, refining and finally trading and marketing established the core competencies on which the company was founded.

 

       On 4 August 2005, the board of directors announced the appointment of Jorma Ollila, chairman and CEO of Nokia at the time, to succeed Aad Jacobs as the company’s non-executive chairman on 1 June 2006. Ollila is the first Shell chairman to be neither Dutch nor British. Other non-executive directors include Maarten van den Bergh, Wim Kok, Nina Henderson, Lord Kerr, Adelbert van Roxe, and Christine Morin-Postel.

 

       As of 1 July 2009, Peter Voser was CEO of Shell. Peter, who is Swiss, is the first non-Dutch, non-British CEO of the company. 
 

Management

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