History
The "Continental Oil and Transportation Company" was founded by Isaac Elder Blake in November 1875.[9][10] Based in Ogden, Utah, the company distributed the recently discovered mineral resources of petroleum / oil (first found in August 1859 by Edwin Drake (1819–1880), in a well drilled at Oil Creek, near Titusville, (Crawford County), in the far northwestern corner of Pennsylvania) and its refined by-products of kerosene, benzene, and other products in the Western United States.[11] Continental Oil Company was acquired by Standard Oil Company in 1884, and was subsequently spun off during the Standard Oil divestiture in 1911.
The main office was later moved to Ponca City, Oklahoma, when in 1929, Marland Oil Company (founded by exploration pioneer E. W. Marland) acquired the Continental Oil Company.[10][12] Marland Oil acquired the assets (subject to liabilities) of Continental Oil Company for a consideration of 2,317,266 shares of stock. The merged company took the more recognizable Continental name along with the Conoco brand. However, it adopted Marland's red triangle logo, which it retained until 1970, when the now-familiar capsule logo was adopted.[13][14]
Dan Moran (1888–1948, led company 1928–1947), who succeeded Marland Oil Company founder E. W. Marland as president of Marland Oil in 1928, and subsequently became the first president of the merged Conoco. Moran then ran Conoco for twenty years, seeing the company through economic hardships and challenges of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and retiring in 1947, the year before he died.[15] The company ran into early trouble when, shortly after acquisition, it was hit by the Great New York Stock Market Crash of October 1929. Conoco became a key supplier to the United States federal government and its world-wide deployment of the United States Armed Forces, along with several other Allied powers and their militaries during the Second World War (1939/1941-1945).[16]
Under the leadership of successor Leonard F. McCollum, Conoco grew from a regional petroleum company to a global corporation in the post-war years after World War II of the late 1940s and into the 1950s. Another rough patch for the company came two decades later during the 1970s energy crisis, beginning with the 1973–1974 Arab oil embargo (resulting from the fourth Arab-Israeli conflict of the Yom Kippur War of October 1973), from which it did not fully recover until 1981, when Conoco became a subsidiary of former corporate rival DuPont company of Wilmington, Delaware.[17][18]
In 1981, Dome Petroleum made a tender offer for 20% of Conoco. More than 50% of Conoco shares were tendered, evidence that shareholders were unhappy, and several companies made their own tender offers to take over Conoco.[19] Cash rich and wanting to diversify, Seagram Company Ltd. engineered a takeover of Conoco. Although Seagram acquired a 32.2% stake in Conoco, DuPont was brought in as a "white knight" by the oil company and entered the bidding war. Mobil Corporation, the nation's second-largest oil company at the time, also joined the bid, and borrowed $5 billion to bid for Cocono.[20] In the end, Seagram and Mobil lost out in the Conoco bidding war.[21] In exchange for its stake in Conoco Inc, Seagram became a 24.3% owner (almost one-quarter of stock / interest) of the DuPont company. By 1995, Seagram was DuPont's largest single shareholder with four seats on the board of directors.[22]
In 1998, DuPont sold 30% of Conoco,[23] and in 1999, DuPont sold the remaining 70% stake it holds in Conoco Inc.[24] When the independent Conoco went public in October 1998, under a retooled name, Continental Oil Company, it resulted in the largest IPO in history.[25][26] In 2001, Conoco announced it has agreed to buy Gulf Canada for C$6.7 billion dollars (Canadian), (equal to $4.3 billion, in the United States currency).[27][28][29] Conoco merged with Phillips Petroleum in 2002 to form ConocoPhillips
