Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Today’s Company of the Day is Exxon Mobil Corporation.

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Talk about the Standard by which all others are judged — Exxon Mobil dominates its industry as few other companies can. The world’s largest integrated oil company is the foremost heir of the old Standard Oil, the business empire built by John D. Rockefeller and broken apart by a US federal antitrust ruling in 1911. Before it changed its name to Exxon about 40 years ago, the company operated as Standard Oil of New Jersey, a.k.a. Jersey Standard. During this period it operated with the signature bluff style that still characterizes many of its positions: Exxon is very big, very strong, very smart, and very determined to dominate its competitors — and doesn’t care who knows it.

The company took on its present shape in 1999, when Exxon acquired Mobil Corporation, another Standard heir that used to operate as the Standard Oil Company of New York, or Socony. Besides reuniting two of the constituent parts of Rockefeller’s behemoth, the merger paired Exxon’s gigantic production operations with Mobil’s marketing savvy. The results, especially given the sky-high oil prices of recent years, have been impressive. For each of the last two years, Exxon Mobil has brought in more than a billion dollars of revenue per day, and the company set consecutive US records for annual corporate profits in 2005 and 2006. (If that’s not impressive enough, try this: the company’s market capitalization is roughly equivalent to Microsoft’s plus Citigroup’s.) As for the future, Exxon Mobil predicts more of the same; while some of its rivals, BP and Shell among them, are building out portfolios of alternative energy sources, Exxon Mobil scoffs at wind and solar, staying true to the black gold that has served it so well thus far.

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