Word: mobilize
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...combination would be one of the biggest in U.S. business history. At last week's prices, buying the necessary shares would cost Mobil (which already owns 4.5% of Marcor's stock) at least $350 million. Adding Marcor's $4 billion 1973 sales to Mobil's $11 billion would boost Mobil from seventh rank in the FORTUNE 500 list to fourth...
...companies, facing the certainty of takeovers of their overseas wells by many foreign governments, have been seeking to hedge their bets. Gulf Oil, for example, in the last year has tried unsuccessfully to buy the CNA insurance business and even the Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey circus. Last week Mobil Oil went it one better by announcing plans to make a tender offer for 51% of the stock of Marcor Inc., the parent company of the Montgomery Ward retail chain and Container Corp., a packaging giant...
...Mobil quickly ran into a barrage of objections. Congressional critics noted that oil companies have said that their high profits (Mobil's rose 48% in 1973, to $849 million) were needed to finance oil exploration, production and refinery building-not diversification. Federal Energy Administrator John C. Sawhill, who has defended oil profits as "necessary" on precisely that ground, complained that Mobil's plan "puts me in a difficult position...
...Enough. The Department of Justice is expected to look into possible antitrust violations. In 1969 John Mitchell, then Attorney General, announced that the department "may very well oppose any merger among the top 200 manufacturing firms or firms of comparable size in other industries." Since Mobil is the seventh largest industrial firm by sales and Marcor the fourth biggest general retailer by assets, a merger between them would seem to fall squarely within the Mitchell guideline...
Editorial Impression. The verdict left Mobil officials "disappointed" and the question of "inaccuracies" in the ABC special unresolved. Some of Mobil's complaints seem specific enough to merit more than a blanket dismissal. To the ABC statements that Government policy encourages foreign oil exploration at the expense of domestic drilling, for instance, Mobil responded that over the past ten years it has devoted about two-thirds of its exploration funds to projects in the U.S. In refusing to deal individually with such areas of disagreement, the council defended ABC's right to create any "editorial impression" it wants...