Burmah Oil Company Ltd.
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| Public | |
| Industry | Oil |
| Fate | Acquired |
| Successor | BP |
| Founded | 1886 |
| Defunct | 2000 |
| Headquarters | Glasgow, Scotland |
The Burmah Oil Company was a leading Scottish oil business which was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
The company was founded as the Rangoon Oil Company in Glasgow in 1886 by David Sime Cargill to develop oil fields in the Indian subcontinent. In the late 1890s, it passed into the ownership of Sir Campbell Kirkman Finlay, whose family already possessed vast colonial interests through their trading vehicle James Finlay and Co.
In the first decade of the 20th century, Burmah Oil became an early and major shareholder in Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) - later Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, then British Petroleum and eventually BP. It restricted its downstream interests to the Indian subcontinent, where BP had no business interests. In 1923, the company gave £5,000 (£236,000 in 2011 money)[2] to future Prime Minister Winston Churchill to lobby the British government to allow them sole control over oil resources in Persia.
It played a major role in the oil industry in the Indian subcontinent for about a century through its subsidiaries, and in the discovery of oil in the Middle East through its significant influence over British Petroleum. It marketed itself under the BOC brand in Burma, Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) and Assam (in India) and through a joint venture Burmah-Shell with Shell in the rest of India.
Until 1901, when the Standard Oil Company started operations in Burma, Burmah Oil enjoyed a monopoly in the region. The company operated in Burma until 1963, when Ne Win nationalised all industries in the country. Based on nationalized assets of Burmah Oil, the Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise was created.
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