By Just like US giant coffee brand, Starbucks Coffee, ditched the word ‘Coffee’ from its logo, to retain only Starbucks as name in 2011, the Royal Dutch Shell is set to remove Royal Dutch from its name and retain only Shell.
The Royal Dutch Shell Plc, commonly known as Shell, is an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague in the Netherlands. It is incorporated in the United Kingdom as a public limited company. The company’s joint ventures account for more than 21% of Nigeria’s total petroleum production from more than eighty fields and spearheaded the first successful oil well drilled at Oloibiri in January 1956.
Shell, Europe’s largest energy company, said on Monday that it was proposing to move its headquarters to Britain from the Netherlands and make major changes in its share ownership and tax status, including dropping “Royal Dutch” from its name, according to a news report in The New York Times.
The moves are intended to make the company, whose share price has lagged rivals, more appealing to investors, and they come less than a month after an activist investor, Daniel Loeb, suggested changes to the company’s structure.
In the Netherlands, where Shell is the largest public company, the government said it “very much regrets” the announcement. However, the British government, which has struggled to demonstrate that its separation from the European Union can provide a boost to business, welcomed the shift. The country’s business minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, called it “a clear vote of confidence in the British economy.”
Among the changes announced by the company, top management including the chief executive, Ben van Beurden, would move to Britain, and the headquarters would be in London. The company’s current dual British and Dutch share structure would be melded into a single class of shares.
The changes will come up for approval at a general meeting of shareholders scheduled for December 10.
