John Browne1 British Petroleum Key Accomplishments

By Author: STEPHANIE
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Germany approved BP2's bid for Veba oil, making BP that nation's marketing and refining leader

Solidified BP's position in the fastgrowing Chinese market, with a $2.

7 billion joint venture3 there.

John Browne lights up a rich Cuban cigar in his London office as he reflects on the year. The CEO of BP PLC (BP ) has plenty of reasons to be satisfied. Browne, a bachelor, is about to move - ' mfmrvmm^^^^^^m 'nto an Edwardian" house in Cam-276 , :> ,'i^m^^^^m brjdge5 tnat ne has been |avjsh|y reno. vating. And he looks forward to several years of refining what is already a formidable6 profit machine.

Many people in the oil patch consider Browne, 53, to be the industry pacesetter. A decade ago, BP was a struggling midsize company short on earnings and clout7. But Browne, who was promoted to CEO in 1995, has been instrumental in transforming it into the world's No. 2 oil company, behind Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) His $57 billion acquisition of Chicago-based Amoco8 in August, 1998, triggered a huge wave of industry Breitling Bentley Replica ...
... consolidation. Browne then bought Arco in 1999 for $25 billion. These groundbreaking deals are more than paying for themselves. BP's profits for the first nine months of 2001 were up 9% , to a record $ 10.97 billion, despite weaker prices.

Browne's gustiness9 sometimes draws flak.10 His warnings about the dangers of global warming have annoyed some environmentalists, who consider such talk from an oilman to be hypocritical". Lately, Browne has been quiet, but the industry watches his every move for clues about the future.
As he addressed in his speech Beyond Tokyo, Taking small steps never feels entirely satisfactory. Nor does taking action without complete scientific knowledge. But certainty and perfection have never figured prominently in the story of human progress. Business, in particular, is accustomed to making decisions in conditions of considerable uncertainty, applying its experience and skills to areas of activity where much is unknown. That is why it will have a vital role in meeting the challenge of climate change — and why the contribution it is already making is so encouraging.

BP Amoco's Sir John Browne- is working overtime to get you to think differently about oil companies — particularly his own.

Most analysts seem to agree that, no matter what your expertise12 , trying to predict the erratic13 price of oil is pretty slippery14 business. And despite being the leader of one of the most powerful oil companies in the world, Sir John Browne, CEO of BP Amoco Pic, readily admits that even he doesn't know just where the price of oil is headed.

Certainly, the oil market has been a complicated animal in recent years. After enjoying two decades of relatively stable oil market, the world watched prices fluctuate in the last two years from as low as $ 10 to almost $36 last autumn. The oil and gas industry is supposed to be a relic of the so-called old economy, yet the global energy business is a $1.8 trillion-a-year industry that dwarfs information technology, defense, and the auto industry. A nostrum of the new economy is that new technology allows us to use less energy. In fact the reverse is true. Some observers estimate that much of the surge in electricity Breitling Replica demand in regions such as California comes from the reliance on abundant servers required to keep the Internet humming. Higher power demand and recent volatility of oil prices have rekindled concern about energy's impact on world economies, and particularly how it will affect the U. S. economy in the face of a slowdown. Where oil and gas prices go from here depends on hard-to-predict events, but almost certainly big oil along with OPEC will take center stage.

As the CEO of a company likely to be right in the thick of the action, Browne is keeping a careful watch on industry trends. Recently, at the World Economic Forum, he made this striking prediction, "The amount of oil used in the next 10 years will exceed all the oil consumed in the first five decades of the last century. "

With cigar in hand and reading specs perched at the end of his nose, the sqftspoken Cambridge graduate gives the outward appearance of an erudite jockey in a Savile Row suit. His command of the facts appears total , as does his disciplined attention to financial performance.