ExxonMobil Petrochemical company. The company’s presence in Singapore dates back to 1893, with the establishment of the Vacuum Oil Company, which sold lubricants under the Mobiloil brand name. It became part of Standard Oil Company of New York in 1931, and was renamed Standard- Vacuum Oil Company. This lasted until 1962, when the company was dissolved, leading to the formation of two new companies, Esso (which took its name from the first two letters of Standard Oil) and Mobil.
Both Esso and Mobil started to build their own refineries in Singapore from the 1960s. By the early 1970s, Singapore had become the third largest refining centre in the world after Houston and Rotterdam. New investments were added in the 1980s and 1990s as both Mobil and Esso upgraded their refining capacities and added more downstream petrochemicals and lubricant plants to their Singapore operations. In 1999, Exxon Corporation and Mobil Corporation merged.
A single new state- of- the- art US$2 billion petrochemical plant on Jurong Island was commissioned in 2001. With that investment, ExxonMobil became the largest single foreign investor in Singapore, having invested more than US$6.5 billion in Singapore since the early 1960s. After the merger, ExxonMobil could also boast Singapore’s largest petrol station network, with over 70 outlets.