---
title: "Exxon → Mobil"
url: "https://mahouse.world/ma-deals/exxon-buy-mobil-1998"
type: "M&A deal"
year: "1998"
---

# Exxon → Mobil

The merger that reunited the two largest pieces of Rockefeller's Standard Oil: Exxon's all-share purchase of Mobil, agreed at $73.7bn in December 1998 and valued at about $80bn when it closed in November 1999, created the world's largest oil company and required the largest divestiture yet seen in a merger.

Reunited two of the largest Standard Oil successors and required the divestment of around 2,400 filling stations.

- **Acquirer:** Exxon (United States)
- **Target:** Mobil (United States)
- **Value:** $80.3B
- **Announced:** December 1998
- **Completed:** November 1999
- **Sector:** Energy
- **Deal type:** merger

## Why it mattered

Exxon and Mobil descended from Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of New York, separated by the 1911 break-up. In 1998 oil prices fell to their lowest in more than a decade, and BP had just combined with Amoco. Exxon, the world's largest energy company, and Mobil, the second-largest US oil and gas company, signed on 1 December 1998: 1.32015 Exxon shares for each Mobil share, leaving Mobil's holders about 30% of the group. Exxon's Lee Raymond became chairman and chief executive, Mobil's Lucio Noto vice-chairman. The companies promised about $2.8bn of pre-tax synergies and argued that their production businesses — West Africa, the Caspian, Russia, deep water — lined up with minimal overlap.

The overlaps regulators cared about were downstream, and the review took 11 months. The European Commission cleared the deal on 29 September 1999 after Mobil agreed to dissolve its fuels and lubricants partnership with BP and sell its stake in Aral. The Federal Trade Commission approved it on 30 November, the day it closed, on condition that 2,431 service stations were sold — 1,740 from the Northeast to the Mid-Atlantic, 360 in California, 319 in Texas and 12 in Guam — along with Exxon's Benicia refinery in California, pipeline interests and Exxon's jet-engine lubricants business.

## What it left behind

The savings outran the promise. By early 2002 ExxonMobil expected pre-tax synergies of about $7bn a year, against the $2.8bn announced, for about $2.9bn of expected merger costs and roughly 8,000 job cuts by the end of 2001. Rivals kept consolidating: BP Amoco bought ARCO in 2000 and Chevron merged with Texaco in 2001. ExxonMobil's net income of $36bn in 2005 was the largest any company had then reported. From 2008 it began selling the US filling stations it served directly, franchising the brands, and in October 2023 it returned to large-scale M&A with the $59.5bn all-share purchase of Pioneer Natural Resources. It remains the largest investor-owned oil company, behind only Saudi Aramco in market value among energy groups. The deal is a model for combinations where the strategic logic and the antitrust problem sit in different parts of the business: conceding the overlap quickly and in full kept the part that justified the price intact.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ExxonMobil