ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, announced on Thursday that Lee Raymond, its chairman and chief executive, would retire at the end of the year, after 12 years during which he steered the company ahead of its rivals. He will be replaced by Rex Tillerson, 53, ExxonMobil's president and a longtime insider who recently emerged as the heir apparent.
Raymond, 66, has spent the past 42 years at Exxon. Helped by record oil prices, he will leave the company in its best-ever financial and operating form.
"Lee Raymond has been a very strong chairman in a line of very strong chairmen at Exxon," said James Smith, a business professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
"He brought the majors back into the realm of the world's greatest oil companies, with a global presence, financial reach, and diversity of holdings," Smith said.
The company was created in 1999 with the US$82 billion merger of Exxon, the former Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Mobil Oil, once the Standard Oil Co of New York, or SOCONY.
Each day, it pumps 2.5 million barrels of oil -- more than an OPEC producer such as Kuwait -- and 283 million cubic meters of natural gas.
It is the world's top refiner and controls reserves of 22 billion barrels of oil, the most among its publicly traded peers.
But to his critics, Raymond is one of the last hardliners on global climate change.
He remains skeptical that human activity is responsible for the current warming trends, saying that the science is not conclusive. Other industrial giants, including BP, General Electric Co and Ford, have all come out with a more environment-friendly posture in recent years, said Kert Davies, research director at Greenpeace USA.
"There is a spectrum of corporate behavior on global warming and Exxon is the epitome of denial and deception," Davies said. "Raymond is unrepentant on global warming and has boxed himself so far in that corner that there's no going back for him."
Raymond is known for his direct, sometimes abrasive, style and his limited tolerance for analysts, investors or journalists. In some ways, he is an old-fashioned oilman in an industry that has become more diverse, more international and more urbane.
But the company's shareholders have had little to complain about given the company's staggering profits, record dividends and stock performance.
Last year, ExxonMobil posted profits of US$25 billion with sales of US$291 billion -- that is larger than the GDP of countries like Austria or Saudi Arabia. This year, the company is on track for an even better performance.
Since the 1999 merger, ExxonMobil has paid US$33 billion in dividends to its shareholders and spent US$24 billion buying back 8 percent of its shares.
"Raymond has created a company that delivers through the cycles, through the peaks, through the troughs," said Ben Dell, an oil analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, who rates Exxon "outperform" and owns no shares in the company.
"Betting against Exxon over the past 15 years has been a very bad bet," he said.
Raymond, who was born in Watertown, South Dakota, joined Exxon in 1960 with a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota. He spent most of the early years of his career at Exxon in refining and marketing. He became president in 1987 and chief executive and chairman in 1993.
His successor, Tillerson, was born in Wichita Falls, Texas. He joined Exxon in 1975 as a production engineer after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in civil engineering. He rose through the company's ranks in the US, Yemen and Russia, spending his entire career at Exxon's production units. He was named president in March last year, an obvious stepping-stone to replace Raymond.
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