The company was founded in the Netherlands in 1890 with the specific purpose of extracting and marketing oil from the Dutch East Indies. Its early leadership, including Henri Deterding, built the company into a significant producer capable of competing internationally in the emerging global petroleum market.
In April 1907, the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company merged with The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company of the United Kingdom to form the Royal Dutch Shell Group. The merger was arranged by Calouste Gulbenkian, a British-Armenian oil magnate, and resulted in Gulbenkian emerging as a major shareholder of the newly formed group. Under the merger terms, Royal Dutch held 60 percent of the combined entity and Shell Transport held 40 percent.
Both companies maintained their separate legal existence but operated as a single-unit partnership for business purposes. The Dutch company, headquartered at The Hague, managed production and manufacture. The British Anglo-Saxon Petroleum Company, based in London, directed transport and storage of products. This dual-listed structure persisted for nearly a century.
The newly combined group rapidly became the principal competitor of American Standard Oil. By 1920, Royal Dutch Shell was the largest oil producer in the world.
In 1912, Royal Dutch Shell purchased the Rothschilds' Russian oil assets in a stock deal. At that point the group's production portfolio consisted of 53 percent from the East Indies, 29 percent from the Russian Empire, and 17 percent from Romania.
The dual corporate structure that gave Royal Dutch Petroleum Company its identity was dissolved in 2005. Following a major reserves-overstating scandal in 2004 — which resulted in a £17 million fine from the Financial Services Authority, the departure of chairman Philip Watts, and a $450 million shareholder lawsuit settlement — the Shell Group announced plans to simplify to a single capital structure.
On 20 July 2005, the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange (it had been delisted from Euronext on the same date), and it was formally dissolved as a separate legal entity. Its assets, obligations, and identity were absorbed into the newly created single parent company, Royal Dutch Shell plc, incorporated in the United Kingdom.
On 18 November 2005, Royal Dutch Petroleum Company's stock ceased to trade separately. In November 2021, the combined entity announced plans to rename itself Shell plc and relocate its headquarters to London, dropping the Royal Dutch designation that had honoured the original Dutch company's majority stake in the 1907 merger.
The Royal Dutch Petroleum Company's founding role in the 1907 merger shaped the structure of the global energy industry for nearly a century. Through the Royal Dutch Shell Group, its commercial legacy includes being among the "Seven Sisters" that dominated global petroleum from the mid-1940s to mid-1970s, participation in the world's first commercial sea transportation of liquefied natural gas in 1964, and long-running involvement in motorsport through Shell's sponsorship of Formula One teams and track-side fuel supply.
Gallery · 4 related images
