Word: mobilizer
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Though all the Sisters' sales are more than double those in the embargo year of 1973, when the cheap-oil era ended, only three of the companies earned more profit last year than they did then: Shell, Mobil and California Standard (SoCal), which markets under its Chevron Trademark. And none but SoCal has regained the peaks of 1974, when soaring prices gave them a one-shot windfall by raising the value of petroleum they held in inventory. The later profits from price boosts have gone primarily to the OPEC nationalizes of the oil. But the companies have done...
...they have wangled concessions. But they still get to sell the oil from those former concessions, and without having to put any money into new wells and pipelines. Case in point: Saudi Arabia, which has bought 60% of Aramco from the firms that created it 45 years ago, Exxon, Mobil, Texaco and SoCal. But the main result, as SoCal Chairman Harold J. Haynes describes it, is that "capital investment will be supplied by the Saudis. We are relieved of that responsibility...
...MOBIL seems to be doing just about everything right. Its profits rose 7.5% last year, to just over $1 billion, and another 16% in the first half of 1978. Traditionally strong in marketing, it has been leading the swing to self-service gas stations in both the U.S. and Europe; indeed, it was the only Sister to earn a profit last year in the fiercely competitive West German market...
...addition, Mobil has strengthened its position as an oil and gas producer with major interests in the North Sea and Alaska, and has had incredible luck in the Gulf of Mexico. Last year it sank 28 wildcat wells there and struck oil in 14, a feat about equal to a baseball player hitting .425. Mobil has the most important nonenergy businesses of all the Seven; in 1976 it completed a 100% takeover of Marcor, parent of Container Corp. of America and Montgomery Ward. Last year these subsidiaries earned $175 million, or 17.5% of Mobil's profits...
...kinds of energy-shale oil, solar power, coal gasification-but the Sisters expect utility-type regulation by governments that will hold down their return. There is still strong sentiment in Congress to limit, though not forbid, acquisitions in non-oil energy fields. Acquisitions of completely unrelated businesses, like Mobil's link with Marcor, probably will be held back both by political opposition and by :he feeling of most oil managements that they should stick to fields in which petroleum expertise is useful. One solution would be to sink money into development of all kinds of natural resources: potash, salt...