BP

BP plc, LSE: BP, NYSE: BP, TYO: 5051 , originally British Petroleum, is a British energy company with headquarters in London, one of the four vertically integrated private sector oil, natural gas, and gasoline "Super Majors" in the world, along with Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, and Total.

In August 1998, British Petroleum merged with the American Oil Company (Amoco), forming "BP Amoco". This move was widely viewed as a takeover of Amoco by BP, and was only officially described as a merger for legal reasons (after a single year of joint operations, "Amoco" was dropped from the corporate name). The newly-renamed "bp" became an initialism no longer overtly standing for "British Petroleum". At the same time BP used the punning tagline "Beyond Petroleum" in some advertising campaigns. The step away from "British Petroleum" was in part a reflection of the fact that BP had become a global business and also that the direct identification of the company as British was not necessarily an advantage in all its areas of operation.

In the 2005 Fortune Global 500 list of companies, BP was ranked 2nd in the world for turnover with sales at $285 Billion, less than $3 billion dollars short of the number one spot held by Wal-Mart, thus making BP the largest oil company in the world by turnover, in the 2005 Forbes Global 2000 it was ranked the ninth-largest company in the world.

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