Chevron

Chevron Corporation, one of the world's leading energy companies, is headquartered in San Ramon, California, and operates in more than 100 countries. Among its major business activities are exploration and production of oil and gas, refining, transport, and marketing of oil and oil products, manufacturing and sales of industrial chemicals, as well as power generation.

The company's business is quite diversified, in terms of both production capabilities and geographic spread. For example, in 2007 in crude oil and natural gas production Chevron produced 2.62 billion barrels of net daily oil-equivalent, with approximately 70 percent of the volume coming from more than 20 countries other than the United States. Throughout the years, the company also has invested heavily in various capital development projects in oil and gas production, transportation, and sales all over the world, including such countries as Angola, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, and Nigeria. In addition, Chevron has a wide marketing network in 84 countries with approximately 24,000 retail sites and 13 power-generating properties in the United States, Europe, and Asia. In 2007 Chevron made around $214 billion in revenues and nearly $19 billion in net income worldwide.

The company emphasizes four main corporate-level strategies that it is pursuing on a global basis:

This 2006 Chevron gas station design in Redwood City, California, incorporates solar panels on its rooftops.

(1) financial-return objective: aimed at sustainable financial returns that enable Chevron to outperform competition; (2) major business strategies, upstream: aimed at profitable growth in core areas, especially in the natural gas business; (3) major business strategies, downstream: focused on improving returns and selective growth, with a concentration on synergies, and on continuing investment in renewable energy sources; and (4) enabling strategies companywide: focused on investing in people to achieve corporate strategies outlined above, as well as on building organizational capabilities and leveraging technologies.

Chevron, originally known as Standard Oil of California (Socal), was created as a result of the forced breakup of Standard Oil in 1911. After several transformations occurring mainly due to its many concession ventures in the Middle East, by 1980 the company became entirely owned by the Saudi government. In 1984 the cooperation between Socal and Gulf Oil created the largest merger in world business history at the time, and as a part of the merger, Socal changed its brand name to become Chevron Corporation.

Among Chevron's largest business dealings in the next two decades, the merger with Texaco in 2001 was one of the most prominent mergers and acquisitions to date. Although this merger prompted a brief change of name—to ChevronTexaco—the company decided to return to its Chevron name in 2005, with Texaco and its subsidiaries still remaining a brand under the Chevron Corporation. The same [Page 259]year, Chevron entered into another significant deal, a merger with Unocal Corp., which, thanks to Unocal's sizeable geothermal operations in southeast Asia, made Chevron the biggest producer of geothermal energy in the world.

In addition to its core business, Chevron also develops and commercializes advanced and alternative energy sources such as fuel cells, photovoltaic technology, and hydrogen-based fuel. Overall, the company is investing about $300 million a year into alternative fuel sources research and development and has created a biofuels business unit, implicitly indicating that it is becoming a part of Chevron's core business model. In general, all sorts of biofuels and clean technologies are an important part of the company's business.

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