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The CEOs of Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. spoke last year about the merger of the oil giants, according to people familiar with the talks, testing the waters for what could be one of the biggest corporate mergers on record.
Chevron CVX,
Managing Director Mike Wirth and Exxon XOM,
CEO Darren Woods spoke out shortly after the coronavirus pandemic took hold, decimating demand for oil and gas and putting enormous financial pressure on the two companies, people said. The talks have been described as preliminary and are not ongoing, but could return in the future, people said.
Such a deal would bring together the two largest descendants of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly, which was broken by US regulators in 1911, and reshape the oil industry.
The market value of a combined business could exceed $ 350 billion. Exxon has a market value of $ 190 billion, while Chevron’s is $ 164 billion. Together, they would likely form the world’s second largest oil company by market capitalization and production, producing around 7 million barrels of oil and gas per day, based on pre-pandemic levels, second only in both measures after Saudi Aramco.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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