Final Project - Research Paper Example

I started by looking at the main company website which is at http://www.chevron.com/ I was interested to find out how the company chooses to present itself and so I looked under the tab “About Chevron” which was on the top left of the screen. There was a short statement: “At Chevron, we are relentlessly focused on producing safe, reliable energy now and for the future. How are we doing it? By applying the energy we have most in abundance Human energy.” This was not what I expected, because I know already that the main product area is fossil fuels like oil and gas, and I did not expect it to focus on its people.

On other tabs there was information on the manufacturing side of things, and distribution through pipelines, shipping and gas stations. The company profile section provided the most factual information such as the founding date in 1879, in an area near Los Angeles, California. The global workforce is about 60,000 employeees and there are another 4,000 service station employees who are linked to the main company. Its production figures are a little out of date, quoting 2.7 million barrels of net oil-equivalent production per day.

From its location in California the company expanded in the 1920s to ventures in the Philippines, Alaska and Colombia in the quest for oil. In the 1930s they worked in Saudi Arabia and then from the 1940s through the 1970s they built pipelines to transport the oil from their wells. In 2001 the company merged with Texaco to become the second largest U.S. based energy company. The future ventures of the company focus on the Gulf of Mexico and Kazakhstan. There is a recognition that all kinds of energy are going to be needed in the future, not just oil and gas, and so I was pleased to note that a lot of money is being invested in research.

This is an area that I would be interested in working for. The company is bound to present itself in the best possible light and so I looked next for external sources that would give more neutral information. The website www.business.com/directory/ provided a link to the Chevron company website that I had just been looking at, and it also had a link to the Wall Street Journal share prices for Chevron. This is the second source that I used. It gives an up to date snapshot of the company’s performance on the markets and I noted that the share price over the last 12 months had risen: Chevron stock prices, year to 1/14/11 Source: http://online.wsj.com/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=CVX As my third source I followed the course instructions to look at the Hoovers business information page and there I found a list of subsidiaries and locations for the Chevron company.

I was interested to note that Chevron U.S.A. which manages the US side of the business has its headquarters in San Ramon, California. The offices and research areas are not located in the same place as the oil and gas fields. I was reassured by my research on the company because I found its home web pages to be professional and positive. The market trend over a year is positive, with share prices rising despite the increasing costs of finding oil resources as older fields are getting used up.

The company has been involved in mergers, and shows flexibility in its links with other countries, always looking for new sources of raw material. I could see also that there were areas of the business outside pure manufacturing, like the development of additives and various kinds of research. In