Shell Company: The Early Stage

Shell Company: The Early Stage
Shell was born in the early days of the oil boom and started out in the shadow of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly, which was able to drive many emerging rival oil companies out of business by undercutting their price and taking over their shares of the market.

Royal Dutch/Shell was the result of a merger in 1907 between the British-based Shell Transport and Trading Company, which pioneered the use of seagoing oil tankers, and the Royal Dutch Petroleum company, which made its fortune developing and exploiting new oil fields in Borneo and Sumatra.

During the Civil War, when some of the slaves from Trepagnier Plantation were joining Union forces to fight the Confederacy in Louisiana, a British Jew from the East End of London was setting up as a merchant on the docks in that great city. Marcus Samuel was an enterprising fellow who decided to greet ships returning to England from India, Japan, Africa and the Middle east and offer to buy any trinkets and curious that sailors had collected abroad. Before long, word spread among sailors that they could augment their wages by selling to Samuel. With business thriving, Samuel opened large warehouses on the docks to collect these items and resell them. Among the items he purchased were exotic shells, which he had glued onto wooden jewelry boxes. Those boxes were sold to young women who came to the beach for a holiday.

His grandson later took his fortune and expanded import/export business, opening offices in Japan and London.

In the 1890s, the French Rothschild family decided to go into business exploiting the oil fields opening in Baku in Russia. Needing a partner to help them transport and sell the oil, they turned to Marcus Samuel.

In 1907, Sir Marcus Samuel and Henry Deterding merged the Shell Transport and Trading Company with the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company to create Royal Dutch/Shell. Today Royal Dutch/Shell is the world second largest oil company. The company is 40 percent owned by Shell Transport and Trading Company and 60 percent owned by Royal Dutch Petroleum. Deterding then bought Shell ashore in the United States in Washington and Louisiana to take on Standard Oil on its home turf. John D. Rockefeller tried to buy out Royal Dutch/Shell with an offer of $100 million in 1910, but the deal was turn down.
Shell Company: The Early Stage

General Motors

General Motors
William Durant was the man who designed and built General Motors. About 1908, Durant began to buy small, successful automobile companies – Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and Chevrolet – and merged them into his new General Motors Corporation.

In an era of fierce competition among numerous small, fledging automakers, the idea of grouping together different automobile companies had been discussed by numerous investors in the early 1900s. After Durant, a major shareholder in Buick Motor Car Company, failed to convince Henry Ford and Ransom E. Olds to join him in such an organization, Durant decided to form his own holding company, General Motors in the fall 1908.

In 1916, he set up a separate subsidiary called United Motors to buy small, successful parts companies. His first acquisitions included Delco, which held Charles Kettering’s patents to the automotive self starter.

Durant ultimately bought about 20 supplier companies; his last acquisitions – in 1919, the year before he was ousted as GM’s CEO – was Fisher Body.

General Motors ushered in the age of mass consumerism with its installment buying and credit programs for car buyers in the 1920s. Coupled with its expansive lineup of cars – from humble Chevrolet to the mighty Cadillac – and yearly style changes, GM’s approach to selling cars was adapted throughout the industry as the standard for mass marketing durable goods to the U.S consumer.

From the start, Durant’s vision was clear: in contrast to Henry Ford’s approach of developing one leading automobile, GM would offer a spectrum of cars at different price levels.

Although GM suffered a downturn during the Great depression, it nevertheless enlarged its market share and after 1930 was ranked as the nation’s largest car maker, ahead of rival Ford Motor Company and the Chrysler Corporation.
General Motors