Royal Dutch Shell Plc history, profile and history video
Royal Dutch Shell Plc engages in the oil and natural gas production. The company operates through the following segments: Upstream, Downstream, and Corporate. The Upstream segment explores for, and extracts crude oil and natural gas, develops fields, produces oil and gas, mines oil sands, extracts bitumen, liquifies gas by cooling (LNG), regasifies LNG, converts gas to liquid products, and generates wind energy. The Downstream segment includes oil refining into fuels and lubricants, petrochemical production, bio-fuel development, trading, rental sales, the management of carbon dioxide emissions, business-to-business sales, and alternative energies businesses. The Corporate segment covers the non-operating activities supporting Shell, which includes Shell’s holdings and treasury organization, its headquarters and central functions, and insurance companies. The company was founded in February 1907 and is headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands.“
“Royal Dutch Shell History
Origins
The Royal Dutch Shell Group was created in February 1907 through the amalgamation of two rival companies – Royal Dutch Petroleum Company and the “Shell” Transport and Trading Company Ltd of the United Kingdom. It was a move largely driven by the need to compete globally with Standard Oil. The terms of the merger gave 60 percent ownership of the new group to the Dutch arm and 40 percent to the British.
Royal Dutch Petroleum Company was a Dutch company founded in 1890 by Jean Baptiste August Kessler, along with Henri Deterding, when a Royal charter was granted by King William III of the Netherlands to a small oil exploration and production company known as “Royal Dutch Company for the Working of Petroleum Wells in the Dutch East Indies”.
The “Shell” Transport and Trading Company (the quotation marks were part of the legal name) was a British company, founded in 1897 byMarcus Samuel, 1st Viscount Bearsted and his brother Samuel Samuel.Their father had owned an antique company in Houndsditch, London, which expanded in 1833 to import and sell sea-shells, after which the company “Shell” took its name.
National patriotic sensibilities would not permit a full-scale merger or takeover of either of the two companies. The Dutch company, Koninklijke Nederlandsche Petroleum Maatschappij, was in charge at The Hague of production and manufacture. A British company was formed, called the Anglo-Saxon Petroleum Company, based in London, to direct the transport and storage of the products.
20th century
During the First World War, Shell was the main supplier of fuel to the British Expeditionary Force. It was also the sole supplier of aviation fuel and supplied 80 percent of the British Army’s TNT. It also volunteered all of its shipping to the British Admiralty.
The German invasion of Romania in 1916 saw 17 percent of the group’s worldwide production destroyed.
In 1919, Shell took control of the Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company and in 1921 formed Shell-Mex Limited which marketed products under the “Shell” and “Eagle” brands in the United Kingdom. In 1929, Shell Chemicals was founded. By the end of the 1920s, Shell was the world’s leading oil company, producing 11 percent of the world’s crude oilsupply and owning 10 percent of its tanker tonnage.
Shell Mex House was completed in 1931, and was the head office for Shell’s marketing activity worldwide. In 1932, partly in response to the difficult economic conditions of the times, Shell-Mex merged its UK marketing operations with those of British Petroleum to create Shell-Mex and BP, a company that traded until the brands separated in 1975. Royal Dutch Company ranked 79th among United States corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts.
The 1930s saw Shell’s Mexican assets seized by the local government. After the invasion of the Netherlands by Germany in 1939, the head office of the Dutch companies was moved to Curacao.
Around 1952, Shell was the first company to purchase and use a computer in the Netherlands. The computer, a Ferranti Mark 1*, was assembled and used at the Shell laboratory in Amsterdam. In 1970 Shell acquired the mining company Billiton, which it subsequently sold in 1994 and now forms part of BHP Billiton.
21st century
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, with its primary listing on the London Stock Exchange, a secondary listing on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, its headquarters and tax residency in The Hague, Netherlands and its registered office in London. The unification was completed on 20 July 2005 and the original owners delisted their companies from the respective exchanges. On 20 July 2005, the Shell Transport & Trading Company plc was delisted from the LSE, where as, Royal Dutch Petroleum Company from NYSE on 18 November 2005. The shares of the company were issued at a 60/40 advantage for the shareholders of Royal Dutch in line with the original ownership of the Shell Group.
During the 2009 Iraqi oil services contracts tender, a consortium led by Shell (45%) and which included Petronas (30%) was awarded a production contract for the “Majnoon field” in the south of Iraq, which contains an estimated 12.6 billion barrels (2.00×109 m3) of oil.The “West Qurna 1 field” production contract was awarded to a consortium led by ExxonMobil (60%) and included Shell (15%).
In February 2010 Shell and Cosan formed a 50:50 joint-venture, Raízen, comprising all of Cosan’s Brazilian ethanol, energy generation, fuel distribution and sugar activities, and all of Shell’s Brazilian retail fuel and aviation distribution businesses. In March 2010, Shell announced the sale of some of its assets, including its liquid petroleum gas (LPG) business, to meet the cost of a planned $28bn capital spending programme. Shell invited buyers to submit indicative bids, due by 22 March, with a plan to raise $2–3bn from the sale. In June 2010, Royal Dutch Shell agreed to acquire all the business of East Resources for a cash consideration of $4.7 billion. The transaction included East Resources’ tight gas fields.
Over the course of 2013, the corporation began the sale of its US shale gas assets and cancelled a US$20 billion gas project that was to be constructed in the US state ofLouisiana. A new CEO Ben van Beurden was appointed in January 2014, prior to the announcement that the corporation’s overall performance in 2013 was 38 per cent lower than 2012—the value of Shell’s shares fell by 3 per cent as a result. Following the sale of the majority of its Australian assets in February 2014, the corporation plans to sell a further US$15 billion worth of assets in the period leading up to 2015, with deals announced in Australia, Brazil and Italy.”
*Information from Forbes.com and Wikipedia.org
**Video published on YouTube by “cecommunications1“