Meyer v. Deterding

Directors of the Standard Oil Co. of N. Y., by electing Charles F. Meyer (one of their number) president last week,* emphasized a unique commercial parallelism.

Standard's great rival in the international oil markets is the Royal Dutch-Shell group, which Sir Henri Wilhelm August Deterding heads.

Both Meyer and Deterding are in their middle sixties. Meyer's ancestors were Germans. Deterding's father was a Dutch sea captain.

Both men, before they became great in the world's oil industry, kept business accounts. Meyer at 22 (in 1886) found work as bookkeeper in the old Standard Oil's Boston office. Soon he became statistician. Deterding at 22 quit work as Chief Clerk in an Amsterdam bank to adventure in the Dutch East Indies, where he sold among a multitude of general items kerosene lamps. The East Indians who used those lamps filled them with Standard oil shipped in square cans from the U. S. Sumatra, Batavia, Borneo, Java and the rest of the archipelago were not yet producing the oil that later the Royal Dutch-Shell was to control. First oil of the region was discovered at Sumatra in the late 1880's; the Royal Dutch Co. (the Dutch royal family are important stockholders) was incorporated at The Hague only in 1890.

In 1892, Deterding became a Royal Dutch employe, at their Batavia headquarters.

In 1893, Standard Oil sent Meyer to manage their Bombay office.

In 1896, Deterding became general sales manager in the Far East for Royal Dutch.

Mr. Meyer went to Manhattan to be a member of Standard Oil's foreign trade committee in 1907, to be vice president and director in 1920. But already, at the beginning of this century, Sir Henri had moved to his Royal Dutch headquarters in The Hague, and from there he directed the fight for customers.

Worth struggling for has been the field -- China with 400,000,000 people, East Indies with 50,000,000, India with 318,000,000. Everywhere Standard Oil was first. In China, to get natives to buy kerosene, Standard salesmen sold lamps for less than a song, for a cheep as inebriates of Singapore used to say. Mei Fooy is the Chinese name for Standard Oil. Shouting Mei Fooy out loudly once saved the life of Lucy Aldrich, John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s sister-in-law, when in 1923 Chinese bandits captured her. It was the only phrase she knew; and the bandits, if they knew not its potency, knew its beneficence. They quickly released her.

In India Sir Henri has used gang tactics for abusing Standard Oil. His English Shell Transport relations have brought him British government aid. Indian duties against Standard oil are higher than against Royal Dutch-Shell oil.

In the East Indies the tactics have been almost the same.

Both to harry Standard Oil on the flank and to boom up Royal Dutch-Shell goodwill throughout the British and Dutch possessions, Sir Henri has been shouting harsh things about Russian petroleum. That oil comes from wells once owned in part by British investors but now confiscated by the Soviet. Standard Oil has been buying it to sell in the East, where it has few wells, but where Royal Dutch-Shell has many. It is more profitable to Standard Oil to ship petroleum from Russia to India than from California to India. Sir Henri, therefore, has been crying loudly that Russian oil is "stolen" and that Standard Oil should be contemned for touching it, that Royal Dutch-Shell should be patronized for shunning it. (Sir Henri tried to buy the same Russian oil but with conditions that the Soviets considered unreasonable.)

But more effective than growls is the tangible armament under Sir Henri Wilhelm August Deterding's command.

At Shanghai, Hongkong, Calcutta, Swatow, Madras, Bombay, Bankok, Amoy and Fu-chau he has great oil storage tanks. Standard Oil has similar stores in:

Japan Indo-China Dutch East Indies

China Siam Straits Settlement

Philippines Burma Australasia

Ceylon India South Africa

''Shell" ships, tankers and auxiliaries, their number is vast, carry Royal Dutch-Shell oil to markets. Opposed to them President Meyer has his own "navy" of 38 ocean going tankers, 5 river steamers, 96 lighters and barges, 68 tugs and launches, and 134 junks.

The money capital of each force is exactly the same. Royal Dutch is capitalized for Florins 600,000,000 ($240,000,000);

"Shell" Transport & Trading for -L-43,000,000 ($215,000,000 approximately). Thus the combined capital of the Royal Dutch-Shell group is very close to $450,000,000. Capital of the Standard Co. of N. Y. is $450,000,000.

Thus either Mr. Meyer, personifying his Standard Oil Co., or Sir Henri, personifying his Royal Dutch-Shell group, is like the dog of the fable, who with a good, juicy bone in his mouth walked onto a plank over a stream. In the water below he saw another dog with another bone, and he wanted the other bone.

But there the parallel ends, for the fabled dog opened his mouth to growl and thereupon dropped his own bone. And, although Sir Henri has been growling, (most indecorously for a British or a Dutch businessman), as if he were the dog on the bridge, he has not loosened his teeth from the Oriental markets. Mr. Meyer, like the dog in the stream, has made no sound in the controversy; nor has he loosened his teeth.

*To succeed Herbert Lee Pratt, elected chairman in succession to Henry Clay Folger, recently resigned.