Paris: Total, left without a leader after the death in a Moscow air accident of chief executive Christophe de Margerie, is a top global oil group and the biggest company in France in terms of sales and profits. A major player on global oil and gas markets, the group moved quickly on Tuesday to announce that its board would meet on finding a successor, and that it would press ahead with its goals.
De Margerie died early on Tuesday while seeking to further one of those key goals, making Russia Total's top production source by 2020. His private jet collided with a snowplough upon takeoff at a Moscow airport in poor visibility, just hours after De Margerie met Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to discuss foreign investment in Russia. In 130 countries around the planet the Total logo, on oil rigs, gas fields or filling stations, stands for the exploration, production, shipping, refining and distribution of hydrocarbon energy products.
In recent years, the company has diversified into renewable energies, and particularly in the sector of solar power. The group is the fifth-biggest quoted oil and gas group in the world by market value or capitalisation, a ranking which excludes state-owned groups such as Saudi Arabia's giant Aramaco group. This places it behind US giant ExxonMobil, Chinese firm Petrochina, British-Dutch group Shell and US company Chevron.In France, Total is a symbol of success in globalisation, but also a subject of controversy for environmental movements, and for critics who consider it pays far too little tax at home.
The group makes more profit than any other French company, generating a net figure of 10.8 billion euros ($13.8 billion) last year.However Total, with a market value of nearly 102 billion euros early on Tuesday, has lost its place as the biggest company when ranked by capitalisation on the main Paris CAC 40 stock index, having been overtaken by a former subsidiary, pharmaceutical group Sanofi, worth 107 billion euros.
Read: CEO of oil giant Total killed in Moscow plane crash
Last year, Total's group sales totalled 189.5 billion euros and the workforce of nearly 100,000 people. The group, with headquarters in a tower block in Paris's La Defense business district, was created in 1924 under the name Compagnie Francaise des Petroles to manage the French interest in the Iraqi oil company. In 1985, the group was re-named Total-CFP, and became just Total in 1991, absorbing in 1999 PetroFina and in 2000 its main French rival Elf Aquitaine, a former state oil group which was privatised in 1994. Today, Total's shares are held entirely on a privatised basis.
Several disasters have damaged the standing of the group. Among these was vast oil pollution off the French Atlantic coast caused by the sinking of the oil tanker Erika, used by Total, in 1999. And in 2001, a huge explosion at the site of a fertilizer subsidiary AZF in Toulouse, southern France, devastated an urban area. The group has also been under attack for its activities in Myanmar, and over allegations about its role at the time of a programme of oil-for-food for Iraq.
Recently, Total has been under fire in France after it emerged that it no longer pays any tax in its home country, where its businesses are loss-making, even though it makes big overall global profits. In recent years the company has made a big push into Russia, which it hopes will be its top production source by 2020. Russia accounted for around a tenth of its output last year, mostly owing to its stake in the Kharyaga oil field in the Russian far north and a stake in Novatek which pumps 10 percent of Russian natural gas. That will increase significantly when the giant Yamal liquefied natural gas project, in which Total holds 20 per cent, comes on line in 2017. At the opening of an international meeting of leaders in the gas and electricity industries in Paris on Tuesday, there was a minute of silence in memory of De Margerie, widely considered to have embodied the group in its global expansion in turbulent times.
Opening the meeting, the head of consultancy firm Petrostrategies, Pierre Terzian, said that De Margerie was a man of "exceptional ability" and that his death was a great loss for his family, and also for "Total, for France, for industry".
